An Energy-Efficient Dynamic Scheduling Method of Deadline-Constrained Workflows in a Cloud Environment

Abstract

With the rapid development of cloud applications, the computing requests of cloud data centers have increased significantly, consuming a lot of energy, making cloud data centers unsustainable, which is very unfavorable from both the cloud provider’s point of view and the environmental point of view. Therefore, it is crucial to minimize energy consumption and improve resource utilization while ensuring user service quality constraints. In this paper, we propose a hybrid workflow scheduling algorithm (Online Hybrid Dynamic Scheduling, OHDS), which aims to minimize the energy consumption of tasks and maximize service resource utilization while satisfying the sub-deadline and data dependency constraints of workflow tasks. Firstly, the data dependencies between workflow tasks are considered for multi-task merging, and sub-deadline constraints are assigned to workflow tasks based on task priority. Secondly, based on the independent nature of the tasks of different workflows, a hybrid scheduling of multiple workflows is performed to reduce service idle time. Then, the workflow task scheduling priority and its sub-deadlines are dynamically adjusted, and the service status is sensed by the CPU utilization of the service, and the workload on the overloaded/underloaded service is balanced by dynamic migration of virtual machines. Finally, the OHDS method is compared with three existing scheduling methods to verify its better performance in terms of scheduling energy consumption, scheduling success rate and service resource utilization.