A hybrid heuristic workflow scheduling algorithm for cloud computing environments

Cloud computing is a relatively new concept in the distributed systems and is widely accepted as a new solution for high performance and distributed computing. Its dynamisms in providing virtual resources for organisations and laboratories and its pay-per-use policy make it very popular. A workflow models a process consisting of a series of steps that shape an application. Workflow scheduling is the method for assigning each workflow task to a processing resource in a way that specific workflow rules are satisfied. Some scheduling algorithms for workflows may assume some quality of service parameter such as cost and deadline. Some efforts have been done on workflow scheduling on cloud computing environments with different service level agreements. But most of them suffer from low speed. Here, we introduce a new hybrid heuristic algorithm based on particle swarm optimisation (PSO) and gravitation search algorithms. The proposed algorithm, in addition to processing cost and transfer cost, takes deadline limitations into account. The proposed workflow scheduling approach can be used by both end-users and utility providers. The CloudSim toolkit is used as a cloud environment simulator and the Amazon EC2 pricing is the reference pricing used. Our experimental result shows about 70% cost reduction, in comparison to non-heuristic implementations, 30% cost reduction in comparison to PSO, 30% cost reduction in comparison to gravitational search algorithm and 50% cost reduction in comparison to hybrid genetic-gravitational algorithm.