Cloud computing infrastructure is suitable for meeting computational needs of large task sizes. Optimal scheduling of tasks in cloud computing environment has been proved to be an NP-complete problem, hence the need for the application of heuristic methods. Several heuristic algorithms have been developed and used in addressing this problem, but choosing the appropriate algorithm for solving task assignment problem of a particular nature is difficult since the methods are developed under different assumptions. Therefore, six rule based heuristic algorithms are implemented and used to schedule autonomous tasks in homogeneous and heterogeneous environments with the aim of comparing their performance in terms of cost, degree of imbalance, makespan and throughput. First Come First Serve (FCFS), Minimum Completion Time (MCT), Minimum Execution Time (MET), Max-min, Min-min and Sufferage are the heuristic algorithms considered for the performance comparison and analysis of task scheduling in cloud computing.

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Performance comparison of heuristic algorithms for task scheduling in IaaS cloud computing environment.

In cloud computing, with full control of the underlying infrastructures, cloud providers can flexibly place user jobs on suitable physical servers and dynamically allocate computing resources to user jobs in the form of virtual machines. As a cloud provider, scheduling user jobs in a way that minimizes their completion time is important, as this can increase the utilization, productivity, or profit of a cloud. In this paper, we focus on the problem of scheduling embarrassingly parallel jobs composed of a set of independent tasks and consider energy consumption during scheduling. Our goal is to determine task placement plan and resource allocation plan for such jobs in a way that minimizes the Job Completion Time (JCT). We begin with proposing an analytical solution to the problem of optimal resource allocation with pre-determined task placement. In the following, we formulate the problem of scheduling a single job as a Non-linear Mixed Integer Programming problem and present a relaxation with an equivalent Linear Programming problem. We further propose an algorithm named TaPRA and its simplified version TaPRA-fast that solve the single job scheduling problem. Lastly, to address multiple jobs in online scheduling, we propose an online scheduler named OnTaPRA. By comparing with the start-of-the-art algorithms and schedulers via simulations, we demonstrate that TaPRA and TaPRA-fast reduce the JCT by 40-430 percent and the OnTaPRA scheduler reduces the average JCT by 60-280 percent. In addition, TaPRA-fast can be 10 times faster than TaPRA with around 5 percent performance degradation compared to TaPRA, which makes the use of TaPRA-fast very appropriate in practice.

Energy-Aware Scheduling of Embarrassingly Parallel Jobs and Resource Allocation in Cloud

In today's world, the internet of things (IoT) is developing rapidly. Wireless sensor network (WSN) as an infrastructure of IoT has limitations in the processing power, storage, and delay for data transfer to cloud. The large volume of generated data and their transmission between WSNs and cloud are serious challenges. Fog computing (FC) as an extension of cloud to the edge of the network reduces latency and traffic; thus, it is very useful in IoT applications such as healthcare applications, wearables, intelligent transportation systems, and smart cities. Resource allocation and task scheduling are the NP-hard issues in FC. Each application includes several modules that require resources to run. Fog devices (FDs) have the ability to run resource management algorithms because of their proximity to sensors and cloud as well as the proper processing power. In this paper, we review the scheduling strategies and parameters as well as providing a greedy knapsack-based scheduling (GKS) algorithm for allocating resources appropriately to modules in fog network. Our proposed method was simulated in iFogsim as a standard simulator for FC. The results show that the energy consumption, execution cost, and sensor lifetime in GKS are better than those of the first-come-first-served (FCFS), concurrent, and delay-priority algorithms.

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Low-latency and energy-efficient scheduling in fog-based IoT applications

As an increasing number of traditional applications migrated to the cloud, achieving resource management and performance optimization in such a dynamic and uncertain environment becomes a big challenge for cloud-based application providers. In particular, job scheduling is a non-trivial task, which is responsible for allocating massive job requests submitted by users to the most suitable resources and satisfying user QoS requirements as much as possible. Inspired by recent success of using deep reinforcement learning techniques to solve AI control problems, in this paper, we propose an intelligent QoS-aware job scheduling framework for application providers. A deep reinforcement learning-based job scheduler is the key component of the framework. It is able to learn to make appropriate online job-to-VM decisions for continuous job requests directly from its experiences without any prior knowledge. Experimental results using synthetic workloads and real-world NASA workload traces show that compared with other baseline solutions, our proposed job scheduling approach can efficiently reduce average job response time (e.g., reduced by 40.4% compared with the best baseline for NASA traces), guarantee the QoS at a high level (e.g., job success rate is higher than 93% for all simulated changing workload scenarios), and adapt to different workload conditions.

DRL-Scheduling: An Intelligent QoS-Aware Job Scheduling Framework for Applications in Clouds

Cloud computing is the most prominent computing paradigm in the present era of information technology. However, data centers needed for hosting cloud services demand huge amount of electrical energy and release harmful gases to the atmosphere. To ensure a sustainable future, there is a need to focus on energy efficiency in cloud computing. Early literature pertaining to energy consumption in cloud computing is primarily focused on individual sub-domains like scheduling techniques, optimization, and green computing metrics. Research literature on cloud resource optimization is found to be the most discussed but less structured. This paper intends to provide a complete picture of energy efficiency in cloud computing. It also classifies heuristics-based optimization methods and the dynamic power management techniques. The survey shows the research trends based on regions, journals, conferences, etc., in the domain of energy efficiency in cloud computing. The study concludes with research issues and future research directions.

Toward energy-efficient cloud computing: a survey of dynamic power management and heuristics-based optimization techniques

Cloud computing is a novel perspective for large scale distributed computing and parallel processing. It provides computing as a utility service on a pay per use basis. The performance and efficiency of cloud computing services always depends upon the performance of the user tasks submitted to the cloud system. Scheduling of the user tasks plays significant role in improving performance of the cloud services. Task scheduling is one of the main types of scheduling performed. This paper presents a detailed study of various task scheduling methods existing for the cloud environment. A brief analysis of various scheduling parameters considered in these methods is also discussed in this paper.

Teena Mathew

Papers

Study and analysis of various task scheduling algorithms in the cloud computing environment