Handling Uncertainty: Pareto-Efficient BoT Scheduling on Hybrid Clouds

Abstract

Coping with uncertainty is a challenging and complex problem particularly in hybrid cloud environments-private cloud plus public cloud. Conflicting goals of minimizing the cost and performance, unknown prior knowledge about task running times, and a lack of estimation tools are just a few of the challenges that resource management systems in those environments encounter. The aim in this paper is to find Pareto-optimal schedules for large-scale Bag-of-Tasks (BoT) applications that meet user defined constraints, such as deadline or budget or some tradeoff between them. BoT applications are common in science and engineering and consist of many independent tasks. To achieve the user's chosen Pareto-optimal schedule, we develop a dynamic resource allocation process for hybrid clouds. We also present a hybrid approach to estimating task running times that incorporates several estimators with a feedback control system to cope with the inherent uncertainty in such estimation. Through extensive experiments on a test bed hybrid cloud, using Amazon EC2 as a public cloud, we show that the proposed approach can achieve near optimality with little overhead, and consistently achieves a solution within 2% of the user's chosen Pareto-optimal schedule. Further, we demonstrate that our approach performs better than an extended List scheduling approach by reducing both the total cost and time needed to run the application by almost 20% and 5% on average, respectively.