Tri-objective Optimization for Large-Scale Workflow Scheduling and Execution in Clouds

Abstract

Cloud computing has become the most popular distributed paradigm with massive computing resources and a large data storage capacity to run large-scale scientific workflow applications without the need to own any infrastructure. Scheduling workflows in a distributed system is a well-known NP-complete problem, which has become even more challenging with a dynamic and heterogeneous pool of resources in a cloud computing platform. The aim of this work is to design efficient and effective scheduling algorithms for multi-objective optimization of large-scale scientific workflows in cloud environments. We propose two novel genetic algorithm (GA)-based scheduling algorithms to assign workflow tasks to different cloud resources in order to simultaneously optimize makespan, monetary cost, and energy consumption. One is multi-objective optimization for makespan, cost and energy (MOMCE), which combines the strengths of two widely adopted solutions, genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization, for multi-objective optimization problems. The other is pareto dominance for makespan, cost and energy (PDMCE), which is based on genetic algorithm and non-dominated solutions to achieve a better convergence and a uniform distribution of the approximate Pareto front. The proposed solutions are evaluated by an extensive set of different workflow applications and cloud environments, and compared with other existing methods in the literature to show the performance stability and superiority. We also conduct performance evaluation and comparison between MOMCE and PDMCE for different criteria.