An Energy and Performance Aware Scheduler for Real-Time Tasks in Cloud Datacentres

Abstract

Datacentres provide the foundations for cloud computing, but require large amounts of electricity for their operation. Approaches that promise to reduce power use by minimizing execution time, for example using different scheduling and resource management techniques, are discussed in the literature. This paper summarizes some of the most important scheduling techniques in clouds focusing on power consumption, covering VM-level, host-level and task-level scheduling where the most promising approach is task level scheduling, with energy savings by means of load filtering, consolidation, adapted CPU throughput, or host power control. We explore use of the rate monotonic (RM) and backfilling algorithms for real-time task scheduling in cloud environment because RM is the simplest fixed priority scheduling technique, and thus the choice for modern real-time systems, and prior uses of RM in task scheduling have demonstrated power efficiency with optimal results. We specifically consider deadline-based tasks scheduling for real-time clouds which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been employed previously. RM with backfilling is experimentally evaluated and results show that, compared to the classical algorithms, all tasks were scheduled with minimum power consumption (5.5% - 29.3%), on minimum resources (3.9% - 25.2% less) while majority were meeting their deadlines (93.21% - 94.7%). The approach can guarantee deadline oriented Software as a Service (SaaS) in cloud if arrival rate i.e. network transfer time can be estimated in advance. We subsequently provided an extension of the proposed approach to task-based load balancing for almost balanced resource utilization and approximately 1.0% to 1.6% energy efficiency.