CA-DAG: Modeling Communication-Aware Applications for Scheduling in Cloud Computing

This paper addresses performance issues of resource allocation in cloud computing. We review requirements of different cloud applications and identify the need of considering communication processes explicitly and equally to the computing tasks. Following this observation, we propose a new communication-aware model of cloud computing applications, called CA-DAG. This model is based on Directed Acyclic Graphs that in addition to computing vertices include separate vertices to represent communications. Such a representation allows making separate resource allocation decisions: assigning processors to handle computing jobs, and network resources for information transmissions. The proposed CA-DAG model creates space for optimization of a number of existing solutions to resource allocation and for developing novel scheduling schemes of improved efficiency.