Evolutionary multi-objective workflow scheduling in Cloud

Cloud computing provides promising platforms for executing large applications with enormous computational resources to offer on demand. In a Cloud model, users are charged based on their usage of resources and the required quality of service (QoS) specifications. Although there are many existing workflow scheduling algorithms in traditional distributed or heterogeneous computing environments, they have difficulties in being directly applied to the Cloud environments since Cloud differs from traditional heterogeneous environments by its service-based resource managing method and pay-per-use pricing strategies. In this paper, we highlight such difficulties, and model the workflow scheduling problem which optimizes both makespan and cost as a Multi-objective Optimization Problem (MOP) for the Cloud environments. We propose an evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO)-based algorithm to solve this workflow scheduling problem on an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform. Novel schemes for problem-specific encoding and population initialization, fitness evaluation and genetic operators are proposed in this algorithm. Extensive experiments on real world workflows and randomly generated workflows show that the schedules produced by our evolutionary algorithm present more stability on most of the workflows with the instance-based IaaS computing and pricing models. The results also show that our algorithm can achieve significantly better solutions than existing state-of-the-art QoS optimization scheduling algorithms in most cases. The conducted experiments are based on the on-demand instance types of Amazon EC2; however, the proposed algorithm are easy to be extended to the resources and pricing models of other IaaS services.This work is supported by the National Science Foundation of China under Grand no. 61272420 and the Provincial Science Foundation of Jiangsu Grand no. BK2011022

A Cuckoo-based Workflow Scheduling Algorithm to Reduce Cost and Increase Load Balance in the Cloud Environment

Workflow scheduling is one of the important issues in implementing workflows in the cloud environment. Workflow scheduling means how to allocate workflow resources to tasks based on requirements and features of the tasks. The problem of workflow scheduling in cloud computing is a very important issue and is an NP problem. The relevant scheduling algorithms try to find optimal scheduling of tasks on the available processing resources in such a way some qualitative criteria when executing the entire workflow are satisfied. In this paper, we proposed a new scheduling algorithm for workflows in the cloud environment using Cuckoo Optimization Algorithm (COA). The aims of the proposed algorithm are reducing the processing and transmission costs as well as maintaining a desirable load balance among the processing resources. The proposed algorithm is implemented in MATLAB and its performance is compared with Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO). The results of the comparisons showed that the proposed algorithm is superior to CSO in discovering optimal solutions

An energy optimization with improved QOS approach for adaptive cloud resources

In recent times, the utilization of cloud computing VMs is extremely enhanced in our day-to-day life due to the ample utilization of digital applications, network appliances, portable gadgets, and information devices etc. In this cloud computing VMs numerous different schemes can be implemented like multimedia-signal-processing-methods. Thus, efficient performance of these cloud-computing VMs becomes an obligatory constraint, precisely for these multimedia-signal-processing-methods. However, large amount of energy consumption and reduction in efficiency of these cloud-computing VMs are the key issues faced by different cloud computing organizations. Therefore, here, we have introduced a dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) based adaptive cloud resource re-configurability (ACRR) technique for cloud computing devices, which efficiently reduces energy consumption, as well as perform operations in very less time. We have demonstrated an efficient resource allocation and utilization technique to optimize by reducing different costs of the model. We have also demonstrated efficient energy optimization techniques by reducing task loads. Our experimental outcomes shows the superiority of our proposed model ACRR in terms of average run time, power consumption and average power required than any other state-of-art techniques

A Parallel Divide-and-Conquer based Evolutionary Algorithm for Large-scale Optimization

Large-scale optimization problems that involve thousands of decision variables have extensively arisen from various industrial areas. As a powerful optimization tool for many real-world applications, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) fail to solve the emerging large-scale problems both effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel Divide-and-Conquer (DC) based EA that can not only produce high-quality solution by solving sub-problems separately, but also highly utilizes the power of parallel computing by solving the sub-problems simultaneously. Existing DC-based EAs that were deemed to enjoy the same advantages of the proposed algorithm, are shown to be practically incompatible with the parallel computing scheme, unless some trade-offs are made by compromising the solution quality.Comment: 12 pages, 0 figure

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

M-dimension hybrid algorithm for scientific workflow in cloud computing

Cloud computing is emerging with growing popularity in workflow scheduling, especially for scientific workflow. With the emergence cloud computing, can benefit from virtually unlimited resources with minimal hardware investment. Scheduling the submitted Scientific Workflow Application (SWFA) tasks to the available computational resources while optimizing the cost of executing the SWFA is one of the most challenging processes of Workflow Management System (WfMS) in a cloud computing environment. Several cost optimization approaches have been proposed to improve the economic aspect of SWFS in cloud computing. The main goal of the paper is to present a new M-dimension hybrid algorithm, which uses a meta-heuristic algorithm such as Completion Time Driven Hyper-Heuristic (CTDHH), Hybrid Cost-effective Hybrid-Scheduling (HCHS), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) and using heuristic algorithms such as the IC-PCPD2 and IC-Loss algorithms. Based on the results of the experimental comparison, the proposed method has proven to yield the most effective performance results for all considered experimental scenarios

Adaptive Resource Allocation and Provisioning in Multi-Service Cloud Environments

In the current cloud business environment, the cloud provider (CP) can provide a means for offering the required quality of service (QoS) for multiple classes of clients. We consider the cloud market where various resources such as CPUs, memory, and storage in the form of Virtual Machine (VM) instances can be provisioned and then leased to clients with QoS guarantees. Unlike existing works, we propose a novel Service Level Agreement (SLA) framework for cloud computing, in which a price control parameter is used to meet QoS demands for all classes in the market. The framework uses reinforcement learning (RL) to derive a VM hiring policy that can adapt to changes in the system to guarantee the QoS for all client classes. These changes include: service cost, system capacity, and the demand for service. In exhibiting solutions, when the CP leases more VMs to a class of clients, the QoS is degraded for other classes due to an inadequate number of VMs. However, our approach integrates computing resources adaptation with service admission control based on the RL model. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt that facilitates this integration to enhance the CP's profit and avoid SLA violation. Numerical analysis stresses the ability of our approach to avoid SLA violation while maximizing the CP’s profit under varying cloud environment conditions

Neural Adaptive Admission Control Framework: SLA-driven action termination for real-time application service management

Although most modern cloud-based enterprise systems, or operating systems, do not commonly allow configurable/automatic termination of processes, tasks or actions, it is common practice for systems administrators to manually terminate, or stop, tasks or actions at any level of the system. The paper investigates the potential of automatic adaptive control with action termination as a method for adapting the system to more appropriate conditions in environments with established goals for both system’s performance and economics. A machine-learning driven control mechanism, employing neural networks, is derived and applied within data-intensive systems. Control policies that have been designed following this approach are evaluated under different load patterns and service level requirements. The experimental results demonstrate performance characteristics and benefits as well as implications of termination control when applied to different action types with distinct run-time characteristics. An automatic termination approach may be eminently suitable for systems with harsh execution time Service Level Agreements, or systems running under conditions of hard pressure on power supply or other constraints. The proposed control mechanisms can be combined with other available toolkits to support deployment of autonomous controllers in high-dimensional enterprise information systems