ACO-based Dynamic Job Scheduling of Parametric Computational Mechanics Studies on Cloud Computing Infrastructures

CARLOS GARCÍA GARINO; CRISTIAN MATEOS; ELINA PACINI

Clouds, Grids and Big Data (Advances in Parallel Computing Series)

IOS Press

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2013; p. 103 - 122

Parameter Sweep Experiments (PSEs) allow scientists to perform simulations by running the same code with different input data, which typically results in many CPU-intensive jobs and thus computing environments such as Clouds must be used. Job scheduling is however challenging due to its inherent NP-completeness. Therefore, some Cloud schedulers based on Swarm Intelligence (SI) techniques, which are good at approximating combinatorial problems, have arisen. We describe a Cloud scheduler based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), a popular SI technique, to allocate Virtual Machines to physical resources belonging to a Cloud. Simulated experiments performed with real PSE job data and alternative classical Cloud schedulers show that our scheduler allows a fair assignment of VMs, which are requested by different users, while maximizing the number of jobs executed every time a new user connects to the Cloud. Unlike previous experiments with our algorithm [9], in which batch execution scenarios for jobs were used, the contribution of this paper is to experiment with our proposal in dynamic scheduling scenarios. Results suggest that our scheduler provides a better balance to the number of executed jobs per unit time versus serviced users, i.e., the number of Cloud users that the scheduler is able to successfully serve.