An enhanced cuckoo optimization algorithm for task graph scheduling in cluster-computing systems

Optimized task scheduling is key to achieve high performance in the cluster-computing systems whose application is broad ranging from scientific to the military purposes. This combinatorial problem is NP-hard from the time complexity perspective, where applying newly proposed metaheuristics to it deserves further investigation based on the well-known no-free-lunch theorem. Accordingly, in this paper, an enhanced version of cuckoo optimization algorithm (COA) named E-COA is proposed to cope with the static task scheduling problem in the mesh topology cluster-computing environments. The proposed approach is equipped with an efficient adaptive semi-stochastic egg-laying strategy that significantly improves the local and global search potentiality of the basic COA. The experiments on a comprehensive set of randomly generated task graphs with different structural parameters reveal the efficiency of the proposed approach from the performance point of view, especially for the small-scale samples, and where the number of clusters in the machine is very restricted, i.e., we are in the lack of computational resource.