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

A WOA-based optimization approach for task scheduling in cloud Computing systems

Task scheduling in cloud computing can directly affect the resource usage and operational cost of a system. To improve the efficiency of task executions in a cloud, various metaheuristic algorithms, as well as their variations, have been proposed to optimize the scheduling. In this work, for the first time, we apply the latest metaheuristics WOA (the whale optimization algorithm) for cloud task scheduling with a multiobjective optimization model, aiming at improving the performance of a cloud system with given computing resources. On that basis, we propose an advanced approach called IWC (Improved WOA for Cloud task scheduling) to further improve the optimal solution search capability of the WOA-based method. We present the detailed implementation of IWC and our simulation-based experiments show that the proposed IWC has better convergence speed and accuracy in searching for the optimal task scheduling plans, compared to the current metaheuristic algorithms. Moreover, it can also achieve better performance on system resource utilization, in the presence of both small and large-scale tasks

A Survey on Load Balancing Algorithms for VM Placement in Cloud Computing

The emergence of cloud computing based on virtualization technologies brings huge opportunities to host virtual resource at low cost without the need of owning any infrastructure. Virtualization technologies enable users to acquire, configure and be charged on pay-per-use basis. However, Cloud data centers mostly comprise heterogeneous commodity servers hosting multiple virtual machines (VMs) with potential various specifications and fluctuating resource usages, which may cause imbalanced resource utilization within servers that may lead to performance degradation and service level agreements (SLAs) violations. To achieve efficient scheduling, these challenges should be addressed and solved by using load balancing strategies, which have been proved to be NP-hard problem. From multiple perspectives, this work identifies the challenges and analyzes existing algorithms for allocating VMs to PMs in infrastructure Clouds, especially focuses on load balancing. A detailed classification targeting load balancing algorithms for VM placement in cloud data centers is investigated and the surveyed algorithms are classified according to the classification. The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive and comparative understanding of existing literature and aid researchers by providing an insight for potential future enhancements.Comment: 22 Pages, 4 Figures, 4 Tables, in pres

Data-intensive service provision based on particle swarm optimization

© 2018, the Authors. The data-intensive service provision is characterized by the large of scale of services and data and also the high-dimensions of QoS. However, most of the existing works failed to take into account the characteristics of data-intensive services and the effect of the big data sets on the whole performance of service provision. There are many new challenges for service provision, especially in terms of autonomy, scalability, adaptability, and robustness. In this paper, we will propose a discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm to resolve the data-intensive service provision problem. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, we compared it with an ant colony optimization algorithm and a genetic algorithm with respect to three performance metrics

Dynamic QoS optimization architecture for cloud-based DDDAS

Cloud computing urges the need for novel on-demand approaches, where the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of cloud-based services can dynamically and adaptively evolve at runtime as Service Level Agreement (SLA) and environment changes. Given the unpredictable, dynamic and on-demand nature of the cloud, it would be unrealistic to assume that optimal QoS can be achieved at design time. As a result, there is an increasing need for dynamic and self- adaptive QoS optimization solutions to respond to dynamic changes in SLA and the environment. In this context, we posit that the challenge of self-adaptive QoS optimization encompasses two dynamics, which are related to QoS sensitivity and conflicting objectives at runtime. We propose novel design of a dynamic data-driven architecture for optimizing QoS influenced by those dynamics. The architecture leverages on DDDAS primitives by employing distributed simulations and symbiotic feedback loops, to dynamically adapt decision making metaheuristics, which optimizes for QoS tradeoffs in cloud-based systems. We use a scenario to exemplify and evaluate the approach

Analysis of power consumption in heterogeneous virtual machine environments

Reduction of energy consumption in Cloud computing datacenters today is a hot a research topic, as these consume large amounts of energy. Furthermore, most of the energy is used inefficiently because of the improper usage of computational resources such as CPU, storage and network. A good balance between the computing resources and performed workload is mandatory. In the context of data-intensive applications, a significant portion of energy is consumed just to keep alive virtual machines or to move data around without performing useful computation. Moreover, heterogeneity of resources increases the difficulty degree, when trying to achieve energy efficiency. Power consumption optimization requires identification of those inefficiencies in the underlying system and applications. Based on the relation between server load and energy consumption, we study the efficiency of data-intensive applications, and the penalties, in terms of power consumption, that are introduced by different degrees of heterogeneity of the virtual machines characteristics in a cluster