A Provenance-based Adaptive Scheduling Heuristic for Parallel Scientific Workflows in Clouds

In the last years, scientific workflows have emerged as a fundamental abstraction for structuring and executing scientific experiments in computational environments. Scientific workflows are becoming increasingly complex and more demanding in terms of computational resources, thus requiring the usage of parallel techniques and high performance computing (HPC) environments. Meanwhile, clouds have emerged as a new paradigm where resources are virtualized and provided on demand. By using clouds, scientists have expanded beyond single parallel computers to hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines. Although the initial focus of clouds was to provide high throughput computing, clouds are already being used to provide an HPC environment where elastic resources can be instantiated on demand during the course of a scientific workflow. However, this model also raises many open, yet important, challenges such as scheduling workflow activities. Scheduling parallel scientific workflows in the cloud is a very complex task since we have to take into account many different criteria and to explore the elasticity characteristic for optimizing workflow execution. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive scheduling heuristic for parallel execution of scientific workflows in the cloud that is based on three criteria: total execution time (makespan), reliability and financial cost. Besides scheduling workflow activities based on a 3-objective cost model, this approach also scales resources up and down according to the restrictions imposed by scientists before workflow execution. This tuning is based on provenance data captured and queried at runtime. We conducted a thorough validation of our approach using a real bioinformatics workflow. The experiments were performed in SciCumulus, a cloud workflow engine for managing scientific workflow execution.     

Using imbalance metrics to optimize task clustering in scientific workflow executions

Scientific workflows can be composed of many fine computational granularity tasks. The runtime of these tasks may be shorter than the duration of system overheads, for example, when using multiple resources of a cloud infrastructure. Task clustering is a runtime optimization technique that merges multiple short running tasks into a single job such that the scheduling overhead is reduced and the overall runtime performance is improved. However, existing task clustering strategies only provide a coarse-grained approach that relies on an over-simplified workflow model. In this work, we examine the reasons that cause Runtime Imbalance and Dependency Imbalance in task clustering. Then, we propose quantitative metrics to evaluate the severity of the two imbalance problems. Furthermore, we propose a series of task balancing methods (horizontal and vertical) to address the load balance problem when performing task clustering for five widely used scientific workflows. Finally, we analyze the relationship between these metric values and the performance of proposed task balancing methods. A trace-based simulation shows that our methods can significantly decrease the runtime of workflow applications when compared to a baseline execution. We also compare the performance of our methods with two algorithms described in the literature.     

Framework for automated partitioning and execution of scientific workflows in the cloud

Scientific workflows have become a standardized way for scientists to represent a set of tasks to overcome/solve a certain scientific problem. Usually these workflows consist of numerous CPU and I/O-intensive jobs that are executed using workflow management systems (WfMS), on clouds, grids, supercomputers, etc. Previously, it was shown that using k-way partitioning to distribute a workflow’s tasks between multiple machines in the cloud reduces the overall data communication and therefore lowers the cost of the bandwidth usage. A framework was built to automate this process of partitioning and execution of any workflow submitted by a scientist that is meant to be run on Pegasus WfMS, in the cloud, with ease. The framework provisions the instances in the cloud using CloudML, configures and installs all the software needed for the execution, partitions and runs the provided scientific workflow, also showing the estimated makespan and cost.     

Adaptive scheduling for parallel tasks with QoS satisfaction for hybrid cloud environments

A hybrid cloud integrates private clouds and public clouds into one unified environment. For the economy and the efficiency reasons, the hybrid cloud environment should be able to automatically maximize the utilization rate of the private cloud and minimize the cost of the public cloud when users submit their computing jobs to the environment. In this paper, we propose the Adaptive-Scheduling-with-QoS-Satisfaction algorithm, namely AsQ, for the hybrid cloud environment to raise the resource utilization rate of the private cloud and to diminish task response time as much as possible. We exploit runtime estimation and several fast scheduling strategies for near-optimal resource allocation, which results in high resource utilization rate and low execution time in the private cloud. Moreover, the near-optimal allocation in the private cloud can reduce the amount of tasks that need to be executed on the public cloud to satisfy their deadline. For the tasks that have to be dispatched to the public cloud, we choose the minimal cost strategy to reduce the cost of using public clouds based on the characteristics of tasks such as workload size and data size. Therefore, the AsQ can achieve a total optimization regarding cost and deadline constraints. Many experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed AsQ. The results show that the performance of the proposed AsQ is superior to recent similar algorithms in terms of task waiting time, task execution time and task finish time. The results also show that the proposed algorithm achieves a better QoS satisfaction rate than other similar studies.     

Optimizing virtual machine allocation for parallel scientific workflows in federated clouds

Cloud computing has established itself as an interesting computational model that provides a wide range of resources such as storage, databases and computing power for several types of users. Recently, the concept of cloud computing was extended with the concept of federated clouds where several resources from different cloud providers are inter-connected to perform a common action (e.g. execute a scientific workflow). Users can benefit from both single-provider and federated cloud environment to execute their scientific workflows since they can get the necessary amount of resources on demand. In several of these workflows, there is a demand for high performance and parallelism techniques since many activities are data and computing intensive and can execute for hours, days or even weeks. There are some Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMS) that already provide parallelism capabilities for scientific workflows in single-provider cloud. Most of them rely on creating a virtual cluster to execute the workflow in parallel. However, they also rely on the user to estimate the amount of virtual machines to be allocated to create this virtual cluster. Most SWfMS use this initial virtual cluster configuration made by the user for the entire workflow execution. Dimensioning the virtual cluster to execute the workflow in parallel is then a top priority task since if the virtual cluster is under or over dimensioned it can impact on the workflow performance or increase (unnecessarily) financial costs. This dimensioning is far from trivial in a single-provider cloud and specially in federated clouds due to the huge number of virtual machine types to choose in each location and provider. In this article, we propose an approach named GraspCC-fed to produce the optimal (or near-optimal) estimation of the amount of virtual machines to allocate for each workflow. GraspCC-fed extends a previously proposed heuristic based on GRASP for executing standalone applications to consider scientific workflows executed in both single-provider and federated clouds. For the experiments, GraspCC-fed was coupled to an adapted version of SciCumulus workflow engine for federated clouds. This way, we believe that GraspCC-fed can be an important decision support tool for users and it can help determining an optimal configuration for the virtual cluster for parallel cloud-based scientific workflows.     

A hybrid evolutionary algorithm for task scheduling and data assignment of data-intensive scientific workflows on clouds

A growing number of data- and compute-intensive experiments have been modeled as scientific workflows in the last decade. Meanwhile, clouds have emerged as a prominent environment to execute this type of workflows. In this scenario, the investigation of workflow scheduling strategies, aiming at reducing its execution times, became a top priority and a very popular research field. However, few work consider the problem of data file assignment when solving the task scheduling problem. Usually, a workflow is represented by a graph where nodes represent tasks and the scheduling problem consists in allocating tasks to machines to be executed at a predefined time aiming at reducing the makespan of the whole workflow. In this article, we show that the scheduling of scientific workflows can be improved when both task scheduling and the data file assignment problems are treated together. Thus, we propose a new workflow representation, where nodes of the workflow graph represent either tasks or data files, and define the Task Scheduling and Data Assignment Problem (TaSDAP), considering this new model. We formulated this problem as an integer programming problem. Moreover, a hybrid evolutionary algorithm for solving it, named HEA-TaSDAP, is also introduced. To evaluate our approach we conducted two types of experiments: theoretical and practical ones. At first, we compared HEA-TaSDAP with the solutions produced by the mathematical formulation and by other works from related literature. Then, we considered real executions in Amazon EC2 cloud using a real scientific workflow use case (SciPhy for phylogenetic analyses). In all experiments, HEA-TaSDAP outperformed the other classical approaches from the related literature, such as Min–Min and HEFT.     

Workflow-and-Platform Aware task clustering for scientific workflow execution in Cloud environment

A scientific workflow, usually consists of a good mix of fine and coarse computational granularity tasks displaying varied runtime requirements. It has been observed that fine grained tasks incur more scheduling overhead than their execution time, when executed on widely distributed platforms. Task clustering is extensively used, in such situations, as a runtime optimization method which involves combining multiple short duration tasks into a cluster, to be scheduled on a single resource. This helps in minimizing the scheduling overheads of the fine grained tasks. However, tasks grouping curtails the degree of parallelism and hence needs to be done optimally. Though a number of task clustering techniques have been developed to reduce the impact of system overheads, they fail to identify the appropriate number of clusters at each level of workflow in order to achieve maximum possible parallelism. This work proposes a level based autonomic Workflow-and-Platform Aware (WPA) task clustering technique which takes into consideration both; the workflow structure and the underlying resource set size for task clustering. It aims to achieve maximum possible parallelism among the tasks at a level of a workflow while minimizing the system overheads and resource wastage. A comparative study with current state of the art task clustering approaches on four well-known scientific workflows show that the proposed method significantly reduces the overall workflow execution time and at the same time is able to consolidate the load onto minimum possible resources.     

一种云环境下科学工作流执行计划的优化方法

为降低云环境下科学工作流的执行代价,提出了一种执行计划的优化方法。引入猴群算法,依靠对当前执行计划的层内和层间优化,在保证工作流全局截止时间约束的前提下,通过同层任务的逻辑聚合和任务的层间调整,尽可能减少各层任务数的差异,以避免资源的闲置浪费,缩短任务的等待时间。实验表明,该方法与类似研究相比,可降低资源消耗量,减小总的延迟时间。     

Cost-Time Efficient Scheduling Plan for Executing Workflows in the Cloud

The emergence of Cloud Computing as a model of service provisioning in distributed systems instigated researchers to explore its pros and cons on executing different large scale scientific applications, i.e., Workflows. One of the most challenging problems in clouds is to execute workflows while minimizing the execution time as well as cost incurred by using a set of heterogeneous resources over the cloud simultaneously. In this paper, we present, Budget and Deadline Constrained Heuristic based upon Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time (HEFT) to schedule workflow tasks over the available cloud resources. The proposed heuristic presents a beneficial trade-off between execution time and execution cost under given constraints. The proposed heuristic is evaluated for different synthetic workflow applications by a simulation process and comparison is done with state-of-art algorithm i.e. BHEFT. The simulation results show that our proposed scheduling heuristic can significantly decrease the execution cost while producing makespan as good as the best known scheduling heuristic under the same deadline and budget constraints.     

Workflow performance improvement using model-based scheduling over multiple clusters and clouds

In recent years, a variety of computational sites and resources have emerged, and users often have access to multiple resources that are distributed. These sites are heterogeneous in nature and performance of different tasks in a workflow varies from one site to another. Additionally, users typically have a limited resource allocation at each site capped by administrative policies. In such cases, judicious scheduling strategy is required in order to map tasks in the workflow to resources so that the workload is balanced among sites and the overhead is minimized in data transfer. Most existing systems either run the entire workflow in a single site or use naïve approaches to distribute the tasks across sites or leave it to the user to optimize the allocation of tasks to distributed resources. This results in a significant loss in productivity. We propose a multi-site workflow scheduling technique that uses performance models to predict the execution time on resources and dynamic probes to identify the achievable network throughput between sites. We evaluate our approach using real world applications using the Swift parallel and distributed execution framework. We use two distinct computational environments-geographically distributed multiple clusters and multiple clouds. We show that our approach improves the resource utilization and reduces execution time when compared to the default schedule.     

A security and cost aware scheduling algorithm for heterogeneous tasks of scientific workflow in clouds

Security is increasingly critical for various scientific workflows that are big data applications and typically take quite amount of time being executed on large-scale distributed infrastructures. Cloud computing platform is such an infrastructure that can enable dynamic resource scaling on demand. Nevertheless, based on pay-per-use and hourly-based pricing model, users should pay attention to the cost incurred by renting virtual machines (VMs) from cloud data centers. Meanwhile, workflow tasks are generally heterogeneous and require different instance series (i.e., computing optimized, memory optimized, storage optimized, etc.). In this paper, we propose a security and cost aware scheduling (SCAS) algorithm for heterogeneous tasks of scientific workflow in clouds. Our proposed algorithm is based on the meta-heuristic optimization technique, particle swarm optimization (PSO), the coding strategy of which is devised to minimize the total workflow execution cost while meeting the deadline and risk rate constraints. Extensive experiments using three real-world scientific workflow applications, as well as CloudSim simulation framework, demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our algorithm.     

A Survey of Data-Intensive Scientific Workflow Management

Nowadays, more and more computer-based scientific experiments need to handle massive amounts of data. Their data processing consists of multiple computational steps and dependencies within them. A data-intensive scientific workflow is useful for modeling such process. Since the sequential execution of data-intensive scientific workflows may take much time, Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMSs) should enable the parallel execution of data-intensive scientific workflows and exploit the resources distributed in different infrastructures such as grid and cloud. This paper provides a survey of data-intensive scientific workflow management in SWfMSs and their parallelization techniques. Based on a SWfMS functional architecture, we give a comparative analysis of the existing solutions. Finally, we identify research issues for improving the execution of data-intensive scientific workflows in a multisite cloud.     

允许违反局部时间约束的科学工作流调度策略

提高科学工作流在云环境中的执行效率、降低执行费用受到广泛关注。用户期望的局部QoS约束与工作流的总体执行效率之间往往存在矛盾。针对该现象,在前期的研究基础上提出一种允许违反局部时间约束的科学工作流调度策略。通过对已聚簇的工作流任务集使用任务后向优先合并的方法,可实现任务间空闲时间片的合理利用,进而优化科学工作流的执行时间;另外,为充分利用任务的松弛时间,提高工作流的整体执行效率,允许部分任务的调度违反局部最晚完成时间的约束。实验结果表明,该策略能提前科学工作流的最早完成时间,提高处理机的利用率,并最终降低工作流的执行费用。     

Data-Locality Aware Scientific Workflow Scheduling Methods in HPC Cloud Environments

Efficient data-aware methods in job scheduling, distributed storage management and data management platforms are necessary for successful execution of data-intensive applications. However, research about methods for data-intensive scientific applications are insufficient in large-scale distributed cloud and cluster computing environments and data-aware methods are becoming more complex. In this paper, we propose a Data-Locality Aware Workflow Scheduling (D-LAWS) technique and a locality-aware resource management method for data-intensive scientific workflows in HPC cloud environments. D-LAWS applies data-locality and data transfer time based on network bandwidth to scientific workflow task scheduling and balances resource utilization and parallelism of tasks at the node-level. Our method consolidates VMs and consider task parallelism by data flow during the planning of task executions of a data-intensive scientific workflow. We additionally consider more complex workflow models and data locality pertaining to the placement and transfer of data prior to task executions. We implement and validate the methods based on fairness in cloud environments. Experimental results show that, the proposed methods can improve performance and data-locality of data-intensive workflows in cloud environments.     

DAG分割模型下的云工作流调度策略

为了优化云工作流调度的经济代价和执行效率,提出一种基于有向无循环图（DAG）分割的工作流调度算法PBWS。以工作流调度效率与代价同步优化为目标,算法将调度求解过程划分为三个阶段进行：工作流DAG结构分割、分割结构调整及资源分配。工作流DAG结构分割阶段在确保任务间执行顺序依赖的同时求解初始的任务分割图;分割结构调整阶段以降低执行跨度为目标,在不同分割间对任务进行重分配;资源分配阶段旨在选择代价最高效的任务与资源映射关系,确保资源的总空闲时间最小。利用五种科学工作流DAG模型对算法进行了仿真实验。结果表明。PBWS算法仅以较小的执行跨度为开销,极大降低了工作流执行代价,实现了调度效率与调度代价的同步优化,其综合性能是优于同类型算法的。     

On-demand minimum cost benchmarking for intermediate dataset storage in scientific cloud workflow systems

Many scientific workflows are data intensive: large volumes of intermediate datasets are generated during their execution. Some valuable intermediate datasets need to be stored for sharing or reuse. Traditionally, they are selectively stored according to the system storage capacity, determined manually. As doing science on clouds has become popular nowadays, more intermediate datasets in scientific cloud workflows can be stored by different storage strategies based on a pay-as-you-go model. In this paper, we build an intermediate data dependency graph (IDG) from the data provenances in scientific workflows. With the IDG, deleted intermediate datasets can be regenerated, and as such we develop a novel algorithm that can find a minimum cost storage strategy for the intermediate datasets in scientific cloud workflow systems. The strategy achieves the best trade-off of computation cost and storage cost by automatically storing the most appropriate intermediate datasets in the cloud storage. This strategy can be utilised on demand as a minimum cost benchmark for all other intermediate dataset storage strategies in the cloud. We utilise Amazon clouds’ cost model and apply the algorithm to general random as well as specific astrophysics pulsar searching scientific workflows for evaluation. The results show that benchmarking effectively demonstrates the cost effectiveness over other representative storage strategies.     

Storage-aware Algorithms for Scheduling of Workflow Ensembles in Clouds

This paper focuses on data-intensive workflows and addresses the problem of scheduling workflow ensembles under cost and deadline constraints in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. Previous research in this area ignores file transfers between workflow tasks, which, as we show, often have a large impact on workflow ensemble execution. In this paper we propose and implement a simulation model for handling file transfers between tasks, featuring the ability to dynamically calculate bandwidth and supporting a configurable number of replicas, thus allowing us to simulate various levels of congestion. The resulting model is capable of representing a wide range of storage systems available on clouds: from in-memory caches (such as memcached), to distributed file systems (such as NFS servers) and cloud storage (such as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage). We observe that file transfers may have a significant impact on ensemble execution; for some applications up to 90 % of the execution time is spent on file transfers. Next, we propose and evaluate a novel scheduling algorithm that minimizes the number of transfers by taking advantage of data caching and file locality. We find that for data-intensive applications it performs better than other scheduling algorithms. Additionally, we modify the original scheduling algorithms to effectively operate in environments where file transfers take non-zero time.     

A characterization of workflow management systems for extreme-scale applications

Automation of the execution of computational tasks is at the heart of improving scientific productivity. Over the last years, scientific workflows have been established as an important abstraction that captures data processing and computation of large and complex scientific applications. By allowing scientists to model and express entire data processing steps and their dependencies, workflow management systems relieve scientists from the details of an application and manage its execution on a computational infrastructure. As the resource requirements of today’s computational and data science applications that process vast amounts of data keep increasing, there is a compelling case for a new generation of advances in high-performance computing, commonly termed as extreme-scale computing, which will bring forth multiple challenges for the design of workflow applications and management systems. This paper presents a novel characterization of workflow management systems using features commonly associated with extreme-scale computing applications. We classify 15 popular workflow management systems in terms of workflow execution models, heterogeneous computing environments, and data access methods. The paper also surveys workflow applications and identifies gaps for future research on the road to extreme-scale workflows and management systems.     

An Evaluation of the Cost and Performance of Scientific Workflows on Amazon EC2

Workflows are used to orchestrate data-intensive applications in many different scientific domains. Workflow applications typically communicate data between processing steps using intermediate files. When tasks are distributed, these files are either transferred from one computational node to another, or accessed through a shared storage system. As a result, the efficient management of data is a key factor in achieving good performance for workflow applications in distributed environments. In this paper we investigate some of the ways in which data can be managed for workflows in the cloud. We ran experiments using three typical workflow applications on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform. We discuss the various storage and file systems we used, describe the issues and problems we encountered deploying them on EC2, and analyze the resulting performance and cost of the workflows.     

一种高效的跨平台工作流优化方法

为了应对复杂的数据分析任务,研究人员设计开发出结合多个平台的跨平台数据处理系统。系统跨平台工作流中算子的平台选择对于系统性能至关重要,因为算子在不同平台上的实现会产生性能间的显著差异。目前多使用基于成本的优化方法来实现跨平台工作流的平台选择,但现有的成本模型由于无法挖掘跨平台工作流的潜在信息而导致成本估计不准确。提出一种高效的跨平台工作流优化方法,采用GGFN模型作为成本模型,以算子特征和工作流特征作为模型输入,利用图注意力机制捕捉有向无环图型跨平台工作流的结构信息和算子邻居节点信息,同时结合门控循环单元记忆算子的运行时序信息,从而实现准确的成本估计。在此基础上,根据跨平台工作流的特点设计算子实现平台的枚举算法,利用基于GGFN的成本模型和延迟贪婪剪枝方法进行枚举操作,为每个算子选择合适的实现平台。实验结果表明,该方法可以将跨平台工作流的执行性能提升3倍,运行时间缩短60%以上。