Dynamic Scheduling of Workflow for Makespan and Robustness Improvement in the IaaS Cloud

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud is attracting applications due to the scalability, dynamic resource provision, and pay-as-you-go cost model. Scheduling scientific workflow in the IaaS cloud is faced with uncertainties like resource performance variations and unknown failures. A schedule is said to be robust if it is able to absorb some degree of the uncertainties during the workflow execution. In this paper, we propose a novel workflow scheduling algorithm called Dynamic Earliest-Finish-Time (DEFT) in the IaaS cloud improving both makespan and robustness. DEFT is a dynamic scheduling containing a set of list scheduling loops invoked when some tasks complete successfully and release resources. In each loop, unscheduled tasks are ranked, a best virtual machine (VM) with minimum estimated earliest finish time for each task is selected. A task is scheduled only when all its parents complete, and the selected best VM is ready. Intermediate data is sent from the finished task to each of its child and the selected best VM before the child is scheduled. Experiments show that DEFT can produce shorter makespans with larger robustness than existing typical list and dynamic scheduling algorithms in the IaaS cloud.