Multi-objective Energy Aware Scheduling of Deadline Constrained Workflows in Clouds using Hybrid Approach

Cloud computing is undoubtedly one of the most significant advances in the domain of information technology. It facilitates elastic and on-demand provisioning of high performance computing capabilities employing pay-per-use model that has snowballed its adoption by scientists and engineers over the past few years. They often exploit workflows to represent their massive applications. Workflow scheduling in cloud has been devoted considerable investigation by researchers owing to its NP-complete nature of problem. Most of the previous studies targeted optimization of schedule length and execution cost within given deadlines/budget restrictions, or both. However, enormous energy consumption in the cloud data centers is not only negatively impacting the environment but also resulting in increased operational costs and thus cannot be ignored. Efficient scheduling strategies can significantly lessen the energy usage while complying with the user’s Quality of Service limitations. This research study proposes a Hybrid Approach for Energy aware scheduling of Deadline constrained workflows (HAED) using Intelligent Water Drops algorithm and Genetic Algorithm, which provides non-dominated solutions to the user. In particular, it focuses on multiple objectives i.e. reduction of schedule length, execution cost and energy usage within deadlines specified by the user. Its performance has been assessed on four scientific workflows from diverse domains using hypervolume and set coverage. The results achieved with the simulations demonstrate that the solutions produced by HAED are of better quality in terms of accuracy and diversity than non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm and hybrid particle swarm optimization.