Budget‐aware scheduling algorithms for scientific workflows with stochastic task weights on infrastructure as a service Cloud platforms

Summary This paper introduces several budget‐aware algorithms to deploy scientific workflows on Infrastructure as a Service Cloud platforms, where users can request Virtual Machines (VMs) of different types, each with specific cost and computing resources. We use a realistic application/platform model with stochastic task weights, and VMs communicating through a Cloud storage. We extend two well‐known algorithms, MinMin and HEFT, and make scheduling decisions based upon machine availability and remaining budget. During the mapping process, the budget‐aware algorithms make conservative assumptions to avoid exceeding the initial budget; we further improve the results with refined versions that aim at rescheduling some tasks onto faster VMs, thereby spending any budget fraction leftover by the first allocation. These refined variants are much more time‐consuming than the former algorithms, so there is a trade‐off to find in terms of scalability. We report an extensive set of simulations with workflows from the Pegasus benchmark suite. Most of the time, our budget‐aware algorithms succeed in achieving efficient makespans while enforcing the given budget, and this despite the uncertainty in task weights.