Static scheduling of multiple workflows with soft deadlines in non-dedicated heterogeneous environments

• We present an approach to scheduling of multiple workflows with soft deadlines.
• We analyze the impact of time restrictions on a quality of schedules.
• We perform experiments with several types of synthetic and domain-specific data sets.
• Accounting of time restrictions leads to the increase of the quality of schedules.
• Clustering-based scheduling scheme outperforms task-based and workflow-based schemes.

Typical patterns of using scientific workflows include their periodical executions using a fixed set of computational resources. Using the statistics from multiple runs, one can accurately estimate task execution and communication times to apply static scheduling algorithms. Several workflows with known estimates could be combined into a set to improve the resulting schedule. In this paper, we consider the mapping of multiple workflows to partially available heterogeneous resources. The problem is how to fill free time windows with tasks from different workflows, taking into account users’ requirements of the urgency of the results of calculations. To estimate quality of schedules for several workflows with various soft deadlines, we introduce the unified metric incorporating levels of meeting constraints and fairness of resource distribution.The main goal of the work was to develop a set of algorithms implementing different scheduling strategies for multiple workflows with soft deadlines in a non-dedicated environment, and to perform a comparative analysis of these strategies. We study how time restrictions (given by resource providers and users) influence the quality of schedules, and which scheme of grouping and ordering the tasks is the most effective for the batched scheduling of non-urgent workflows. Experiments with several types of synthetic and domain-specific sets of multiple workflows show that: (i) the use of information about time windows and deadlines leads to the significant increase of the quality of static schedules, (ii) the clustering-based scheduling scheme outperforms task-based and workflow-based schemes. This was confirmed by an evaluation of studied algorithms on a basis of the CLAVIRE workflow management platform.