Data-Aware Approximate Workflow Scheduling

Abstract: Optimization of data placement in complex scientific workflows has become very crucial since the large amounts of data generated by these workflows significantly increases the turnaround time of the end-to-end application. It is almost impossible to make an optimal scheduling for the end-to-end workflow without considering the intermediate data movement. In order to reduce the complexity of the workflow-scheduling problem, most of the existing work constrains the problem space by some unrealistic assumptions, which result in non-optimal scheduling in practice. In this study, we propose a genetic data-aware algorithm for the end-to-end workflow scheduling problem. Distinct from the past research, we develop a novel data-aware evaluation function for each chromosome, a common augmenting crossover operator and a simple but effective mutation operator. Our experiments on different workflow structures show that the proposed GA based approach gives a scheduling close to the optimal one.