Abstract—Cloud computing resources scheduling is
significant for executing the workflows in cloud platform
because it relates to both the execution time and execution cost.
In order to take both the time and cost into consideration,
Rodriguez and Buyya have proposed a cost-minimization and
deadline-constrained workflow scheduling model on cloud
computing. Their model has great applicability but the solution
of their particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach is not good
enough and cannot meet a tight deadline condition. In this paper,
we propose a genetic algorithm (GA) approach to solve this
model. In order to tackle with the tight deadline condition, a
dynamic objective strategy is further proposed to let GA focus on
optimize the execution time objective to meet the deadline
constraint when the feasible solution hasn’t been obtained. After
obtaining a feasible solution, the GA focuses on optimizing the
execution cost within the deadline constraint. Therefore, the
proposed dynamic objective GA (DOGA) has adaptive ability to
the search environment to different objectives. We have conduct
extensive experiments based on workflows with different scales
and different cloud resources. Experimental results show that
DOGA can find better solution with smaller cost than PSO does
on different scheduling scales and different deadline conditions.
DOGA approach is more applicable to be used in commercial
activities.
Keywords—cloud computing; resource; scheduling; genetic
algorithm; dynamic objective strategy
I. INTRODUCTION
loud computing is the development of distributed
computing, parallel computing, and grid computing. It
relies on not only the applications delivered as
Z.-G. Chen, K.-J. Du, Z.-H. Zhan, and J. Zhang are with the Department of
Computer Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China,
with the School of Advanced Computing, Sun Yat-Sen University,
Guangzhou, 510275, China, with the Key Laboratory of Machine
Intelligence and Advanced Computing (Sun Yat-sen University), Ministry of
Education, China, with the Engineering Research Center of Supercomputing
Engineering Software (Sun Yat-sen University), Ministry of Education,
China, and also with the Key Laboratory of Software Technology, Education
Department of Guangdong Province, China. Zhi-Hui Zhan is the
corresponding author, email: zhanzhh@mail.sysu.edu.cn.
This work was supported in part by the, in part by the National Natural
Science Foundations of China (NSFC) with No. 61402545, the Natural
Science Foundations of Guangdong Province for Distinguished Young
Scholars with No. 2014A030306038, the Project for Pearl River New Star in
Science and Technology, Guangzhou, China, the Fundamental Research
Funds for the Central Universities, the NSFC Key Program with No.
61332002, the NSFC for Distinguished Young Scholars with No. 61125205,
and the National High-Technology Research and Development Program (863
Program) of China No.2013AA01A212.
services over the Internet, but also the hardware and software
in the data centers that provide those services [1]. NIST
(National Institute of Standards and Technology)’s definition
of cloud computing [2] is that cloud computing is a model for
enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access
to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g.,
networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that
can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal
management effort or the interaction of service providers.
In 2006, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, first proposed
the concept of “Cloud Computing” in SES San Jose 2006.
Although the birth of cloud computing is less than 10 years,
the present availability of high-capacity networks, low-cost
computers and storage devices as well as the widespread
adoption of hardware virtualization, service-oriented
architecture, and autonomic and utility computing have led to
a growth in cloud computing. Cloud vendors are experiencing
growth rates of 50% per annum [4].
Cloud Computing has several features as follows.
z The vast scale of data. Google Cloud already has over
100 million servers, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo
and other “cloud” all have hundreds of thousands of
servers. “Cloud” can give users an unprecedented
computing power.
z Hardware virtualization. By using virtualization
technology, cloud computing can provide users with
computer infrastructure, server platforms, application
software, and other services via infrastructure as a
service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS ), software as
a service (SaaS ), and other models [2][3]. It enables us
to manage different types of resource easily [5].
Developers only need to consider the scheduling logic
in application level, without the need to consider the
underlying resource scheduling.
z Expansibility. The scale of “cloud” is flexible so that it
can meet the need of application and the growth of the
quantity of users.
z On-demand service. “Cloud” is a huge resource pool and
users can pay money to lease some resources that meet
their demands.
In the dawn of “era of big data”, cloud computing is faced
with those problems that have a huge scale of data. Therefore,
workflow scheduling on clouds has become a significant
research topic. It is related to the cost and efficiency of cloud
computing. But in reality, workflow scheduling is a NP-hard
problem so that it is impossible to generate an optimal
Deadline Constrained Cloud Computing Resources
Scheduling for Cost Optimization Based on Dynamic
Objective Genetic Algorithm
Zong-Gan Chen, Student Member, IEEE, Ke-Jing Du, Zhi-Hui Zhan (Corresponding Author), Member,
IEEE, and Jun Zhang, Senior Member, IEEE
C
978-1-4799-7492-4/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE