Fluctuation-Aware and Predictive Workflow Scheduling in Cost-Effective Infrastructure-as-a-Service Clouds

Cloud computing is becoming an increasingly popular platform for the execution of scientific applications such as scientific workflows. In contrast to grids and other traditional high-performance computing systems, clouds provide a customizable infrastructure where scientific workflows can provision desired resources ahead of the execution and set up a required software environment on virtual machines (VMs). Nevertheless, various challenges, especially its quality-of-service prediction and optimal scheduling, are yet to be addressed. Existing studies mainly consider workflow tasks to be executed with VMs having time-invariant, stochastic, or bounded performance and focus on minimizing workflow execution time or execution cost while meeting the quality-of-service requirements. This work considers time-varying performance and aims at minimizing the execution cost of workflow deployed on Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds while satisfying Service-Level-Agreements with users. We employ time-series-based approaches to capture dynamic performance fluctuations, feed a genetic algorithm with predicted performance of VMs, and generate schedules at run-time. A case study based on real-world third-party IaaS clouds and some well-known scientific workflows show that our proposed approach outperforms traditional approaches, especially those considering time-invariant or bounded performance only.