Cost and Reliability Aware Scheduling of Workflows Across Multiple Clouds with Security Constraints

Abstract: Many real-world scientific workflows can be represented by a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), where each node represents a task and a directed edge signifies a dependency between two tasks. Due to the increasing computational resource requirements of these workflows, they are deployed on multi-cloud systems for execution. In this paper, we propose a scheduling algorithm that allocates resources to the tasks present in the workflow using an efficient list-scheduling approach based on the parameters cost, processing time, and reliability. Next, for a given a task-resource mapping, we propose a cipher assignment algorithm that assigns security services to edges responsible for transferring data in time-optimal manner subject to a given security constraint. The proposed algorithms have been analyzed to understand their time and space requirements. We implement the proposed scheduling and cipher assignment algorithm and experimented with two real-world scientific workflows namely Epigenomics and Cybershake. We compare the performance of the proposed scheduling algorithm with the state-of-art evolutionary methods. We observe that our method outperforms the state-of-art methods always in terms of cost and reliability, and is inferior in terms of makespan in some cases.