A Review of Cost and Makespan-Aware Workflow Scheduling in Clouds

Abstract

Scientific workflow is a common model to organize large scientific computations. It borrows the concept of workflow in business activities to manage the complicated processes in scientific computing automatically or semi-automatically. The workflow scheduling, which maps tasks in workflows to parallel computing resources, has been extensively studied over years. In recent years, with the rise of cloud computing as a new large-scale distributed computing model, it is of great significance to study workflow scheduling problem in the cloud. Compared with traditional distributed computing platforms, cloud platforms have unique characteristics such as the self-service resource management model and the pay-as-you-go billing model. Therefore, the workflow scheduling in cloud needs to be reconsidered. When scheduling workflows in clouds, the monetary cost and the makespan of the workflow executions are concerned with both the cloud service providers (CSPs) and the customers. In this paper, we study a series of cost-and-time-aware workflow scheduling algorithms in cloud environments, which aims to provide researchers with a choice of appropriate cloud workflow scheduling approaches in various scenarios. We conducted a broad review of different cloud workflow scheduling algorithms and categorized them based on their optimization objectives and constraints. Also, we discuss the possible future research direction of the clouds workflow scheduling.