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

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.