An Ant Colony Optimization Approach to Connection-Aware Virtual Machine Placement for Scientific Workflows

The virtual machine (VM) placement problem with the objective to save energy consumption and improve machine utility has been studied extensively in Cloud computing. However, the connection information among VMs during the execution of scientific workflows is seldom considered in existing studies. Therefore, this paper intends to build a novel connection-aware model for VM placement in scientific workflows. Different from existing studies, as the connection information of VMs is considered following the topology of workflows, not only the CPU capacity and memory capacity but also the transmission bandwidth among machines should be considered. An energy- aware, traffic-aware, connection-aware ant colony optimization (ETCACO) approach is developed. The proposed ETCACO combines Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) with a scheduler, namely greedy placeman. Experiments are performed to compare the proposed model with the traditional approach. It is discovered that by taking the connection information into consideration, the proposed approach can reduce energy consumption by 7%.