基于改进多目标布谷鸟搜索的资源调度算法

针对IaaS(Infrastructure as a Service)云计算中资源调度的多目标优化问题,提出一种基于改进多目标布谷鸟搜索的资源调度算法。在多目标布谷鸟搜索算法的基础上,通过改进随机游走策略和丢弃概率策略提高了算法的局部搜索能力和收敛速度。以最大限度地减少完成时间和成本为主要目标,将任务分配特定的VM(Virtual Manufacturing)满足云用户对云提供商的资源利用的需求,从而减少延迟,提高资源利用率和服务质量。实验结果表明,该算法可以有效地解决IaaS云计算环境中资源调度的多目标问题,与其他算法相比,具有一定的优势。     

一种云工作流任务调度能效优化算法

工作流任务执行时带来的高能耗不仅会增加云资源提供方的经济成本,而且会降低云系统的可靠性。为了满足截止时间的同时,降低工作流执行能耗,提出一种工作流能效调度算法CWEES。算法将能效优化调度划分为三个阶段：初始任务映射、处理器资源合并和任务松驰。初始任务映射旨在通过任务自底向上分级排序得到任务调度初始序列,处理器资源合并旨在通过重用松驰时间合并相对低效率的处理器,降低资源使用数量,任务松驰旨在为每个任务重新选择带有合适电压/频率等级的最优目标资源,在不违背任务顺序和截止时间约束前提下降低工作流执行总能耗。通过随机工作任务模型对算法的性能进行了仿真实验分析。结果表明,CWEES算法不仅资源利用率更高,而且可以在满足截止时间约束下降低工作流执行能耗,实现执行效率与能耗的均衡。     

HEART: Unrelated parallel machines problem with precedence constraints for task scheduling in cloud computing using heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms

Cloud computing is becoming a profitable technology because of it offers cost-effective IT solutions globally. A well-designed task scheduling algorithm ensures the optimal utilization of clouds resources and reducing execution time dynamically. This research article deals with the task scheduling of inter-dependent subtasks on unrelated parallel computing machines in a cloud computing environment. This article considers two variants of the problem-based on two different objective function values. The first variant considers the minimization of the total completion time objective function while the second variant considers the minimization of the makespan objective function. Heuristic and meta-heuristic (HEART) based algorithms are proposed to solve the task scheduling problems. These algorithms utilize the property of list scheduling algorithm of unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem. A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation has been provided for the two variants of the problem. The optimal solution is obtained by solving MILP formulation using A Mathematical Programming Language (AMPL) software. Extensive numerical experiments have been performed to evaluate the performance of proposed algorithms. The solutions obtained by the proposed algorithms are found to out-perform the existing algorithms. The proposed algorithms can be used by cloud computing service providers (CCSPs) for enhancing their resources utilization to reduce their operating cost.     

云环境中基于分解的多目标工作流调度算法

云服务提供商在给用户提供海量虚拟资源的同时,也面临着一个现实的问题,即怎样调度这些资源,以最小的代价(完工时间、执行费用、资源利用率等)完成工作流的执行。针对IaaS环境下的工作流调度问题,以完工时间和执行费用作为目标,提出了一种基于分解的多目标工作流调度算法。该算法结合了基于列表的启发式算法和多目标进化算法的选择过程,采用一种分解方法,将多目标优化问题分解为一组单目标优化子问题,然后同时求解这些单目标子问题,使得调度过程更为简单有效。算法利用天马项目发布的现实世界中的工作流进行实验,结果表明,和MOHEFT算法以及NSGA-II*算法相比较,所提出的算法能得到更优的Pareto解集,同时具有更低的时间复杂度。     

云环境下周期和非周期混合实时任务双容错调度算法

云环境中的处理机故障已成为云计算不可忽视的问题,容错成为设计和发展云计算系统的关键需求。针对一些容错调度算法在任务调度过程中调度效率低下以及任务类型单一的问题,提出一种处理机和任务主副版本分组的容错调度方法;并给出了副版本可重叠执行的判定方法,以及任务最坏响应时间的计算公式。通过实验和分析表明,和以前算法相比,将处理机分成两组分别执行任务主版本和任务副版本,减少了任务调度所需进行可调度测试的时间,增加了副版本重叠执行的机会,减少了所需的处理机个数,对提高系统处理机的利用率和容错调度的效率具有重要的意义。     

Efficient task scheduling for budget constrained parallel applications on heterogeneous cloud computing systems

As the cost-driven public cloud services emerge, budget constraint is one of the primary design issues in large-scale scientific applications executed on heterogeneous cloud computing systems. Minimizing the schedule length while satisfying the budget constraint of an application is one of the most important quality of service requirements for cloud providers. A directed acyclic graph (DAG) can be used to describe an application consisted of multiple tasks with precedence constrains. Previous DAG scheduling methods tried to presuppose the minimum cost assignment for each task to minimize the schedule length of budget constrained applications on heterogeneous cloud computing systems. However, our analysis revealed that the preassignment of tasks with the minimum cost does not necessarily lead to the minimization of the schedule length. In this study, we propose an efficient algorithm of minimizing the schedule length using the budget level (MSLBL) to select processors for satisfying the budget constraint and minimizing the schedule length of an application. Such problem is decomposed into two sub-problems, namely, satisfying the budget constraint and minimizing the schedule length. The first sub-problem is solved by transferring the budget constraint of the application to that of each task, and the second sub-problem is solved by heuristically scheduling each task with low-time complexity. Experimental results on several real parallel applications validate that the proposed MSLBL algorithm can obtain shorter schedule lengths while satisfying the budget constraint of an application than existing methods in various situations.     

基于可满足性模理论的多处理机通信延迟优化任务调度方法

在一组相同处理器上调度带有通信延迟的任务图以实现其最短的执行时间,这在并行计算的调度理论和实践中具有重要的意义。针对具有通信延迟的任务图调度问题,提出一种基于可满足性模理论（SMT）的改进SMT方法。首先,将处理器映射约束和任务执行顺序等约束条件进行编码,将任务图调度问题转化为SMT问题;然后,调用SMT求解器对可行解空间进行搜索,以确定问题最优解。在约束编码阶段,使用整型变量表示任务和处理器的映射关系,从而降低处理器约束编码的复杂程度;在求解器调用阶段,通过添加独立任务的约束条件减小求解器的搜索空间,进一步提升最优解的查找效率。实验结果表明,与原始SMT方法相比,改进SMT方法在20 s和1 min超时实验中的平均求解时间分别减少了65.9%与53.8%,并且在处理器数量较多时取得了更大的效率优势。改进的SMT方法可以有效求解带通信延迟的任务图调度问题,尤其适用于处理器数量较多的调度场景。     

A high performance algorithm for static task scheduling in heterogeneous distributed computing systems

Effective task scheduling is essential for obtaining high performance in heterogeneous distributed computing systems (HeDCSs). However, finding an effective task schedule in HeDCSs requires the consideration of both the heterogeneity of processors and high interprocessor communication overhead, which results from non-trivial data movement between tasks scheduled on different processors. In this paper, we present a new high-performance scheduling algorithm, called the longest dynamic critical path (LDCP) algorithm, for HeDCSs with a bounded number of processors. The LDCP algorithm is a list-based scheduling algorithm that uses a new attribute to efficiently select tasks for scheduling in HeDCSs. The efficient selection of tasks enables the LDCP algorithm to generate high-quality task schedules in a heterogeneous computing environment. The performance of the LDCP algorithm is compared to two of the best existing scheduling algorithms for HeDCSs: the HEFT and DLS algorithms. The comparison study shows that the LDCP algorithm outperforms the HEFT and DLS algorithms in terms of schedule length and speedup. Moreover, the improvement in performance obtained by the LDCP algorithm over the HEFT and DLS algorithms increases as the inter-task communication cost increases. Therefore, the LDCP algorithm provides a practical solution for scheduling parallel applications with high communication costs in HeDCSs.     

GSAGA: A hybrid algorithm for task scheduling in cloud infrastructure

Cloud computing is becoming a very popular form of distributed computing, in which digital resources are shared via the Internet. The user is provided with an overview of many available resources. Cloud providers want to get the most out of their resources, and users are inclined to pay less for better performance. Task scheduling is one of the most important aspects of cloud computing. In order to achieve high performance from cloud computing systems, tasks need to be scheduled for processing by appropriate computing resources. The large search space of this issue makes it an NP-hard problem, and more random search methods are required to solve this problem. Multiple solutions have been proposed with several algorithms to solve this problem until now. This paper presents a hybrid algorithm called GSAGA to solve the Task Scheduling Problem (TSP) in cloud computing. Although it has a high ability to search the problem space, the Genetic Algorithm (GA) performs poorly in terms of stability and local search. It is therefore possible to create a stable algorithm by combining the general search capacities of the GA with the Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA). Our experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can solve the problem with higher efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art.

     

多机相关任务的相关矩阵调度算法

本文讨论了多机相关任务的调度问题，从时间和空间两方面考虑，提出了一种新的多机相关任务的调度算法－多机相关任务的相关矩阵调度算法（ＲＭＳＡ）。利用可变的相关矩阵Ｍｕ，表示任务的空间需求与处理机的局部存储空间的关系以及任务分配的状态。实验表明此算法具有较短的调度长度，并且具有较好的时间均衡性和空间协调性。     

Reliability-aware scheduling strategy for heterogeneous distributed computing systems

Heterogeneous computing systems are promising computing platforms, since single parallel architecture based systems may not be sufficient to exploit the available parallelism with the running applications. In some cases, heterogeneous distributed computing (HDC) systems can achieve higher performance with lower cost than single-machine supersystems. However, in HDC systems, processors and networks are not failure free and any kind of failure may be critical to the running applications. One way of dealing with such failures is to employ a reliable scheduling algorithm. Unfortunately, most existing scheduling algorithms for precedence constrained tasks in HDC systems do not adequately consider reliability requirements of inter-dependent tasks. In this paper, we design a reliability-driven scheduling architecture that can effectively measure system reliability, based on an optimal reliability communication path search algorithm, and then we introduce reliability priority rank (RRank) to estimate the task’s priority by considering reliability overheads. Furthermore, based on directed acyclic graph (DAG) we propose a reliability-aware scheduling algorithm for precedence constrained tasks, which can achieve high quality of reliability for applications. The comparison studies, based on both randomly generated graphs and the graphs of some real applications, show that our scheduling algorithm outperforms the existing scheduling algorithms in terms of makespan, scheduling length ratio, and reliability. At the same time, the improvement gained by our algorithm increases as the data communication among tasks increases.     

A hybrid heuristic workflow scheduling algorithm for cloud computing environments

Cloud computing is a relatively new concept in the distributed systems and is widely accepted as a new solution for high performance and distributed computing. Its dynamisms in providing virtual resources for organisations and laboratories and its pay-per-use policy make it very popular. A workflow models a process consisting of a series of steps that shape an application. Workflow scheduling is the method for assigning each workflow task to a processing resource in a way that specific workflow rules are satisfied. Some scheduling algorithms for workflows may assume some quality of service parameter such as cost and deadline. Some efforts have been done on workflow scheduling on cloud computing environments with different service level agreements. But most of them suffer from low speed. Here, we introduce a new hybrid heuristic algorithm based on particle swarm optimisation (PSO) and gravitation search algorithms. The proposed algorithm, in addition to processing cost and transfer cost, takes deadline limitations into account. The proposed workflow scheduling approach can be used by both end-users and utility providers. The CloudSim toolkit is used as a cloud environment simulator and the Amazon EC2 pricing is the reference pricing used. Our experimental result shows about 70% cost reduction, in comparison to non-heuristic implementations, 30% cost reduction in comparison to PSO, 30% cost reduction in comparison to gravitational search algorithm and 50% cost reduction in comparison to hybrid genetic-gravitational algorithm.     

Energy-Aware Scheduling on Multicore Heterogeneous Grid Computing Systems

We address a multicriteria non-preemptive energy-aware scheduling problem for computational Grid systems. This work introduces a new formulation of the scheduling problem for multicore heterogeneous computational Grid systems in which the minimization of the energy consumption, along with the makespan metric, is considered. We adopt a two-level model, in which a meta-broker agent (level 1) receives all user tasks and schedules them on the available resources, belonging to different local providers (level 2). The computing capacity and energy consumption of resources are taken from real multi-core processors from the main current vendors. Twenty novel list scheduling methods for the problem are proposed, and a comparative analysis of all of them over a large set of problem instances is presented. Additionally, a scalability study is performed in order to analyze the contribution of the best new bi-objective list scheduling heuristics when the problem dimension grows. We conclude after the experimental analysis that accurate trade-off schedules are computed by using the new proposed methods.     

Scheduling task graphs optimally with A*

Scheduling tasks onto the processors of a parallel system is a crucial part of program parallelisation. Due to the NP-hard nature of the task scheduling problem, scheduling algorithms are based on heuristics that try to produce good rather than optimal schedules. Nevertheless, in certain situations it is desirable to have optimal schedules, for example for time-critical systems or to evaluate scheduling heuristics. This paper investigates the task scheduling problem using the A* search algorithm which is a best-first state space search. The adaptation of the A* search algorithm for the task scheduling problem is referred to as the A* scheduling algorithm. The A* scheduling algorithm can produce optimal schedules in reasonable time for small to medium sized task graphs with several tens of nodes. In comparison to a previous approach, the here presented A* scheduling algorithm has a significantly reduced search space due to a much improved consistent and admissible cost function f(s) and additional pruning techniques. Experimental results show that the cost function and the various pruning techniques are very effective for the workload. Last but not least, the results show that the proposed A* scheduling algorithm significantly outperforms the previous approach.     

Iterative list scheduling for heterogeneous computing

Optimal scheduling of parallel applications on distributed computing systems represented by directed acyclic graph (DAG) is NP-complete in the general case. List scheduling is a very popular heuristic method for DAG-based scheduling. However, it is more suited to homogenous distributed computing systems. This paper presents an iterative list scheduling algorithm to deal with scheduling on heterogeneous computing systems. The main idea in this iterative scheduling algorithm is to improve the quality of the schedule in an iterative manner using results from previous iterations. The algorithm first uses the heterogeneous earliest-finish-time (HEFT) algorithm to find an initial schedule and iteratively improves it. Hence the algorithm can potentially produce shorter schedule length. The simulation results show that in the majority of the cases, there is significant improvement to the initial schedule. The algorithm is also found to perform best when the tasks to processors ratio is large.     

An improvement on the Migrating Birds Optimization with a problem-specific neighboring function for the multi-objective task allocation problem

Allocating tasks to processors is a well-known NP-Hard problem in distributed computing systems. Due to the lack of practicable exact solutions, it has been attracted by the researchers working on heuristic-based suboptimal search algorithms. With the recent inclusion of multiple objectives such as minimizing the cost, maximizing the throughput and maximizing the reliability, the problem gets even more complex and an efficient approximate method becomes more valuable. In this work, I propose a new solution for the multi-objective task allocation problem. My solution consists in designing a problem-specific neighboring function for an existing metaheuristic algorithm that is proven to be successful in quadratic assignment problems. The neighboring function, namely greedy reassignment with maximum release (GR-MR), provides a dynamic mechanism to switch the preference of the search between the exploration and exploitation. The experiments validate both that the quality of the solutions are close to the optimal and the proposed method performs significantly better comparing to three other metaheuristic algorithms. Neighboring functions being the common reusable components of metaheuristic algorithms, GR-MR can also be utilized by other metaheuristic-based solutions in the future.     

An efficient list-based task scheduling algorithm for heterogeneous distributed computing environment

The task scheduling in heterogeneous distributed computing systems plays a crucial role in reducing the makespan and maximizing resource utilization. The diverse nature of the devices in heterogeneous distributed computing systems intensifies the complexity of scheduling the tasks. To overcome this problem, a new list-based static task scheduling algorithm namely Deadline-Aware-Longest-Path-of-all-Predecessors (DA-LPP) is being proposed in this article. In the prioritization phase of the DA-LPP algorithm, the path length of the current task from all its predecessors at each level is computed and among them, the longest path length value is assigned as the rank of the task. This strategy emphasizes the tasks in the critical path. This well-optimized prioritization phase leads to an observable minimization in the makespan of the applications. In the processor selection phase, the DA-LPP algorithm implements the improved insertion-based policy which effectively utilizes the unoccupied leftover free time slots of the processors which improve resource utilization, further least computation cost allocation approach is followed to minimize the overall computation cost of the processors and parental prioritization policy is incorporated to further reduce the scheduling length. To demonstrate the robustness of the proposed algorithm, a synthetic graph generator is used in this experiment to generate a huge variety of graphs. Apart from the synthetic graphs, real-world application graphs like Montage, LIGO, Cybershake, and Epigenomic are also considered to grade the performance of the DA-LPP algorithm. Experimental results of the DA-LPP algorithm show improvement in performance in terms of scheduling length ratio, makespan reduction rate , and resource reduction rate when compared with other algorithms like DQWS, DUCO, DCO and EPRD. The results reveal that for 1000 task set with deadline equals to two times of the critical path, the scheduling length ratio of the DA-LPP algorithm is better than DQWS by 35%, DUCO by 23%, DCO by 26 %, and EPRD by 17%.     

多核平台下XEN虚拟机动态调度算法研究

虚拟机调度算法对并行任务的执行效率考虑不够充分。现代处理器平台具备了多个可用的计算核心,使多个虚拟机并发执行成为了现实。针对多核平台下的并行虚拟机调度优化问题,提出一种基于任务特征虚拟机CON-Credit调度算法。该算法在调度并行任务时,使用动态方式对计算机核心进行分配,采用传统的虚拟机调度算法为执行普通任务的虚拟机进行分配;采用定制的同步算法给执行并行任务的虚拟机分进分配。相关实验显示,CON-Credit调度算法能显著提高并行任务的执行效率。     

A hybrid heuristic–genetic algorithm for task scheduling in heterogeneous processor networks

Efficient task scheduling on heterogeneous distributed computing systems (HeDCSs) requires the consideration of the heterogeneity of processors and the inter-processor communication. This paper presents a two-phase algorithm, called H2GS, for task scheduling on HeDCSs. The first phase implements a heuristic list-based algorithm, called LDCP, to generate a high quality schedule. In the second phase, the LDCP-generated schedule is injected into the initial population of a customized genetic algorithm, called GAS, which proceeds to evolve shorter schedules. GAS employs a simple genome composed of a two-dimensional chromosome. A mapping procedure is developed which maps every possible genome to a valid schedule. Moreover, GAS uses customized operators that are designed for the scheduling problem to enable an efficient stochastic search. The performance of each phase of H2GS is compared to two leading scheduling algorithms, and H2GS outperforms both algorithms. The improvement in performance obtained by H2GS increases as the inter-task communication cost increases.     

Proactive scheduling in distributed computing—A reinforcement learning approach

In distributed computing such as grid computing, online users submit their tasks anytime and anywhere to dynamic resources. Task arrival and execution processes are stochastic. How to adapt to the consequent uncertainties, as well as scheduling overhead and response time, are the main concern in dynamic scheduling. Based on the decision theory, scheduling is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP). To address this problem, an approach from machine learning is used to learn task arrival and execution patterns online. The proposed algorithm can automatically acquire such knowledge without any aforehand modeling, and proactively allocate tasks on account of the forthcoming tasks and their execution dynamics. Under comparison with four classic algorithms such as Min–Min, Min–Max, Suffrage, and ECT, the proposed algorithm has much less scheduling overhead. The experiments over both synthetic and practical environments reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms other algorithms in terms of the average response time. The smaller variance of average response time further validates the robustness of our algorithm.