Deadline Constrained Cloud Computing Resources Scheduling through an Ant Colony System Approach

Cloud computing resources scheduling is essential for executing workflows in the cloud platform because it relates to both execution time and execution cost. In this paper, we adopt a model that optimizes the execution cost while meeting deadline constraints. In solving this problem, we propose an Improved Ant Colony System (IACS) approach featuring two novel strategies. Firstly, a dynamic heuristic strategy is used to calculate a heuristic value during an evolutionary process by taking the workflow topological structure into consideration. Secondly, a double search strategy is used to initialize the pheromone and calculate the heuristic value according to the execution time at the beginning and to initialize the pheromone and calculate heuristic value according to the execution cost after a feasible solution is found. Therefore, the proposed IACS is adaptive to the search environment and to different objectives. We have conducted extensive experiments based on workflows with different scales and different cloud resources. We compare the result with a particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach and a dynamic objective genetic algorithm (DOGA) approach. Experimental results show that IACS is able to find better solutions with a lower cost than both PSO and DOGA do on various scheduling scales and deadline conditions

Cloud computing resource scheduling and a survey of its evolutionary approaches

A disruptive technology fundamentally transforming the way that computing services are delivered, cloud computing offers information and communication technology users a new dimension of convenience of resources, as services via the Internet. Because cloud provides a finite pool of virtualized on-demand resources, optimally scheduling them has become an essential and rewarding topic, where a trend of using Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms is emerging rapidly. Through analyzing the cloud computing architecture, this survey first presents taxonomy at two levels of scheduling cloud resources. It then paints a landscape of the scheduling problem and solutions. According to the taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches is presented systematically. Looking forward, challenges and potential future research directions are investigated and invited, including real-time scheduling, adaptive dynamic scheduling, large-scale scheduling, multiobjective scheduling, and distributed and parallel scheduling. At the dawn of Industry 4.0, cloud computing scheduling for cyber-physical integration with the presence of big data is also discussed. Research in this area is only in its infancy, but with the rapid fusion of information and data technology, more exciting and agenda-setting topics are likely to emerge on the horizon

Energy and performance-optimized scheduling of tasks in distributed cloud and edge computing systems

Infrastructure resources in distributed cloud data centers (CDCs) are shared by heterogeneous applications in a high-performance and cost-effective way. Edge computing has emerged as a new paradigm to provide access to computing capacities in end devices. Yet it suffers from such problems as load imbalance, long scheduling time, and limited power of its edge nodes. Therefore, intelligent task scheduling in CDCs and edge nodes is critically important to construct energy-efficient cloud and edge computing systems. Current approaches cannot smartly minimize the total cost of CDCs, maximize their profit and improve quality of service (QoS) of tasks because of aperiodic arrival and heterogeneity of tasks. This dissertation proposes a class of energy and performance-optimized scheduling algorithms built on top of several intelligent optimization algorithms. This dissertation includes two parts, including background work, i.e., Chapters 3–6, and new contributions, i.e., Chapters 7–11. 1) Background work of this dissertation. Chapter 3 proposes a spatial task scheduling and resource optimization method to minimize the total cost of CDCs where bandwidth prices of Internet service providers, power grid prices, and renewable energy all vary with locations. Chapter 4 presents a geography-aware task scheduling approach by considering spatial variations in CDCs to maximize the profit of their providers by intelligently scheduling tasks. Chapter 5 presents a spatio-temporal task scheduling algorithm to minimize energy cost by scheduling heterogeneous tasks among CDCs while meeting their delay constraints. Chapter 6 gives a temporal scheduling algorithm considering temporal variations of revenue, electricity prices, green energy and prices of public clouds. 2) Contributions of this dissertation. Chapter 7 proposes a multi-objective optimization method for CDCs to maximize their profit, and minimize the average loss possibility of tasks by determining task allocation among Internet service providers, and task service rates of each CDC. A simulated annealing-based bi-objective differential evolution algorithm is proposed to obtain an approximate Pareto optimal set. A knee solution is selected to schedule tasks in a high-profit and high-quality-of-service way. Chapter 8 formulates a bi-objective constrained optimization problem, and designs a novel optimization method to cope with energy cost reduction and QoS improvement. It jointly minimizes both energy cost of CDCs, and average response time of all tasks by intelligently allocating tasks among CDCs and changing task service rate of each CDC. Chapter 9 formulates a constrained bi-objective optimization problem for joint optimization of revenue and energy cost of CDCs. It is solved with an improved multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition. It determines a high-quality trade-off between revenue maximization and energy cost minimization by considering CDCs’ spatial differences in energy cost while meeting tasks’ delay constraints. Chapter 10 proposes a simulated annealing-based bees algorithm to find a close-to-optimal solution. Then, a fine-grained spatial task scheduling algorithm is designed to minimize energy cost of CDCs by allocating tasks among multiple green clouds, and specifies running speeds of their servers. Chapter 11 proposes a profit-maximized collaborative computation offloading and resource allocation algorithm to maximize the profit of systems and guarantee that response time limits of tasks are met in cloud-edge computing systems. A single-objective constrained optimization problem is solved by a proposed simulated annealing-based migrating birds optimization. This dissertation evaluates these algorithms, models and software with real-life data and proves that they improve scheduling precision and cost-effectiveness of distributed cloud and edge computing systems

Workflow Scheduling Techniques and Algorithms in IaaS Cloud: A Survey

In the modern era, workflows are adopted as a powerful and attractive paradigm for expressing/solving a variety of applications like scientific, data intensive computing, and big data applications such as MapReduce and Hadoop. These complex applications are described using high-level representations in workflow methods. With the emerging model of cloud computing technology, scheduling in the cloud becomes the important research topic. Consequently, workflow scheduling problem has been studied extensively over the past few years, from homogeneous clusters, grids to the most recent paradigm, cloud computing. The challenges that need to be addressed lies in task-resource mapping, QoS requirements, resource provisioning, performance fluctuation, failure handling, resource scheduling, and data storage. This work focuses on the complete study of the resource provisioning and scheduling algorithms in cloud environment focusing on Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). We provided a comprehensive understanding of existing scheduling techniques and provided an insight into research challenges that will be a possible future direction to the researchers

Comparison of the Execution Step Strategies on Scheduling Data-intensive Workflows on IaaS Cloud Platforms

The IaaS platforms of the Cloud hold promise for executing parallel applications, particularly data-intensive scientific workflows. An important challenge for users of these platforms executing scientific workflows is to strike the right trade-off between the execution time of the scientific workflow and the cost of using the platform. In a previous article, we proposed an efficient approach that assists the user in finding this compromise. This approach requires an algorithm aimed at minimizing the execution time of the workflow once the platform configuration is set. In this article, we compare two different strategies for executing a workflow after its offline scheduling using an algorithm. The algorithm that we proposed in the previous study has outperform the HEFT algorithm. The first strategy allows some ready tasks to execute earlier than other higher-priority tasks that are ready later due to data transfer times. This strategy is justified by the fact that although our scheduling algorithm attempts to minimize data transfers between tasks running on different virtual machines, this algorithm does not include data transfer times in the planned execution dates for the various tasks of the workflow. The second strategy strictly adheres to the predetermined order among tasks scheduled on the same virtual machine. The results of our evaluations show that the best execution strategy depends on the characteristics of the workflow. For each evaluated workflow, our results demonstrate that our scheduling algorithm combined with the best execution strategy surpasses HEFT. The choice of the best strategy must be determined experimentally following realistic simulations, such as the ones we conduct here using the WRENCH framework, before conducting simulations to find the best compromise between cost and execution time of a workflow on an IaaS platform.

Optimized task scheduling based on hybrid symbiotic organisms search algorithms for cloud computing environment

In Cloud Computing model, users are charged according to the usage of resources and desired Quality of Service (QoS). Task scheduling algorithms are responsible for specifying adequate set of resources to execute user applications in the form of tasks, and schedule decisions of task scheduling algorithms are based on QoS requirements defined by the user. Task scheduling problem is an NP-Complete problem, due to the NP-Complete nature of task scheduling problems and huge search space presented by large scale problem instances, many of the existing solution algorithms incur high computational complexity and cannot effectively obtain global optimum solutions. Recently, Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) has been applied to various optimization problems and results obtained were found to be competitive with state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms. However, similar to the case other metaheuristic optimization algorithms, the efficiency of SOS algorithm deteriorates as the size of the search space increases. Moreover, SOS suffers from local optima entrapment and its static control parameters cannot maintain a balance between local and global search. In this study, Cooperative Coevolutionary Constrained Multiobjective Symbiotic Organisms Search (CC-CMSOS), Cooperative Coevolutionary Constrained Multi-objective Memetic Symbiotic Organisms Search (CC-CMMSOS), and Cooperative Coevolutionary Constrained Multi-objective Adaptive Benefit Factor Symbiotic Organisms Search (CC-CMABFSOS) algorithms are proposed to solve constrained multi-objective large scale task scheduling optimization problem on IaaS cloud computing environment. To address the issue of scalability, the concept of Cooperative Coevolutionary for enhancing SOS named CC-CMSOS make SOS more efficient for solving large scale task scheduling problems. CC-CMMSOS algorithm further improves the performance of SOS algorithm by hybridizing with Simulated Annealing (SA) to avoid entrapment in local optima for global convergence. Finally, CC-CMABFSOS algorithm adaptively turn SOS control parameters to balance the local and global search procedure for faster convergence speed. The performance of the proposed CC-CMSOS, CC-CMMSOS, and CC-CMABFSOS algorithms are evaluated on CloudSim simulator, using both standard workload traces and synthesized workloads for larger problem instances of up to 5000. Moreover, CC-CMSOS, CC-CMMSOS, and CC-CMABFSOS algorithms are compared with multi-objective optimization algorithms, namely, EMS-C, ECMSMOO, and BOGA. The CC-CMSOS, CC-CMMSOS, and CC-CMABFSOS algorithms obtained significant improved optimal trade-offs between execution time (makespan) and financial cost (cost) while meeting deadline constraints with no computational overhead. The performance improvements obtained by the proposed algorithms in terms of hypervolume ranges from 8.72% to 37.95% across the workloads. Therefore, the proposed algorithms have potentials to improve the performance of QoS delivery

Resource provisioning and scheduling algorithms for hybrid workflows in edge cloud computing

In recent years, Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been involved in a wide range of application domains to provide real-time monitoring, tracking and analysis services. The worldwide number of IoT-connected devices is projected to increase to 43 billion by 2023, and IoT technologies are expected to engaged in 25% of business sector. Latency-sensitive applications in scope of intelligent video surveillance, smart home, autonomous vehicle, augmented reality, are all emergent research directions in industry and academia. These applications are required connecting large number of sensing devices to attain the desired level of service quality for decision accuracy in a sensitive timely manner. Moreover, continuous data stream imposes processing large amounts of data, which adds a huge overhead on computing and network resources. Thus, latency-sensitive and resource-intensive applications introduce new challenges for current computing models, i.e, batch and stream. In this thesis, we refer to the integrated application model of stream and batch applications as a hybrid work ow model. The main challenge of the hybrid model is achieving the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the two computation systems. This thesis provides a systemic and detailed modeling for hybrid workflows which describes the internal structure of each application type for purposes of resource estimation, model systems tuning, and cost modeling. For optimizing the execution of hybrid workflows, this thesis proposes algorithms, techniques and frameworks to serve resource provisioning and task scheduling on various computing systems including cloud, edge cloud and cooperative edge cloud. Overall, experimental results provided in this thesis demonstrated strong evidences on the responsibility of proposing different understanding and vision on the applications of integrating stream and batch applications, and how edge computing and other emergent technologies like 5G networks and IoT will contribute on more sophisticated and intelligent solutions in many life disciplines for more safe, secure, healthy, smart and sustainable society