Abstract
Conference Title: AFRICON 2013 Conference Start Date: 2013, Sept. 9 Conference End Date: 2013, Sept. 12 Conference Location: Pointe-Aux-Piments, Mauritius Cloud computing is a dominant technology nowadays in both industry and academia. It evolved from many concepts such as distributed processing and parallel computing. In addition, virtualization is the core of cloud computing since it facilitates live migration for the sake of load balancing. The ultimate result is the optimization of resources utilization and increase in the whole system's performance. Moreover, virtualization plays an important role in achieving disaster recovery plans. Furthermore, virtual machines secure the underlying physical hardware against malware. However, parallel computing is of no less importance, especially to cloud platforms. Consequently, contemporary laptops, mobile and hand-held devices manufacturers produce multicore equipment with the aim of achieving high performance levels when these become nodes in a cloud environment. However, what is the mutual effect of virtualization and parallel processing? Do they impede each other? Do they really boost the overall performance collectively? This research helps to better understand the effect of virtualization on parallel processing. In addition, this paper covers some researches made to answer such questions. Such studies are so few -- to the extent of our knowledge -- that they don't give comprehensive answers to the previously imposed questions. Finally, a methodology is exposed to quantitatively measure the mutual effect of parallelism and virtualization in a cloud environment.