1. A cloud controller of a cloud computing cluster, the cloud controller comprising: a compute service module to receive a request for a new virtual machine; a communication module to receive a contention score for each compute node of a plurality of compute nodes of the cloud computing cluster, the contention score to indicate cache memory contention of the compute node; and a scheduler module to select a compute node based on the contention score; wherein the compute service module is further to schedule the new virtual machine on the selected compute node.