Partitioning-Based Workflow Scheduling in Clouds

Many applications in science and engineering become increasingly complex and large scale. These applications often consist of a large number of precedence-constrained tasks forming workflows represented by directed acyclic graph (DAG). In recent years, cloud computing has greatly leveraged the elastic and cost-efficient deployment of these applications. However, their effective deployment is largely dependent on the scheduling algorithm adopted. Most existing workflow scheduling algorithms are designed to optimize deadline or budget/cost, i.e., one being the objective and the other being constraint. In this paper, we present the Partitioning-Based Workflow Scheduling (PBWS) algorithm, which liberates the user from explicitly setting the upper bound of deadline and cost. Instead, PBWS adopts a slack parameter that controls the tradeoff point between deadline and cost. In particular, PBWS partitions a workflow into a number of small task graphs (or simply partitions) for which the granularity of such partitions is determined by the slack parameter. Each of these partitions is then matched with the best performing cloud resource in terms of both the overall execution time (makespan) and cost. The size of partitions may change by rearranging tasks between different partitions for the optimization of resource assignment. Our experimental results show that our PBWS algorithm outperforms two existing algorithms in terms of cost by a large margin with little overhead on makespan.