A workflow task scheduling algorithm based on the resources' fuzzy clustering in cloud computing environment

Cloud computing is the key and frontier field of the current domestic and international computer technology, workflow task scheduling plays an important part of cloud computing, which is a policy that maps tasks to appropriate resources to execute. Effective task scheduling is essential for obtaining high performance in cloud environment. In this paper, we present a workflow task scheduling algorithm based on the resources' fuzzy clustering named FCBWTS. The major objective of scheduling is to minimize makespan of the precedence constrained applications, which can be modeled as a directed acyclic graph. In FCBWTS, the resource characteristics of cloud computing are considered, a group of characteristics, which describe the synthetic performance of processing units in the resource system, are defined in this paper. With these characteristics and the execution time influence of the ready task in the critical path, processing unit network is pretreated by fuzzy clustering method in order to realize the reasonable partition of processor network. Therefore, it largely reduces the cost in deciding which processor to execute the current task. Comparison on performance evaluation using both the case data in the recent literature and randomly generated directed acyclic graphs shows that this algorithm has outperformed the HEFT, DLS algorithms both in makespan and scheduling time consumed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.