An extended Intelligent Water Drops algorithm for workflow scheduling in cloud computing environment

Cloud computing is emerging as a high performance computing environment with a large scale, heterogeneous collection of autonomous systems and flexible computational architecture. Many resource management methods may enhance the efficiency of the whole cloud computing system. The key part of cloud computing resource management is resource scheduling. Optimized scheduling of tasks on the cloud virtual machines is an NP-hard problem and many algorithms have been presented to solve it. The variations among these schedulers are due to the fact that the scheduling strategies of the schedulers are adapted to the changing environment and the types of tasks. The focus of this paper is on workflows scheduling in cloud computing, which is gaining a lot of attention recently because workflows have emerged as a paradigm to represent complex computing problems. We proposed a novel algorithm extending the natural-based Intelligent Water Drops (IWD) algorithm that optimizes the scheduling of workflows on the cloud. The proposed algorithm is implemented and embedded within the workflows simulation toolkit and tested in different simulated cloud environments with different cost models. Our algorithm showed noticeable enhancements over the classical workflow scheduling algorithms. We made a comparison between the proposed IWD-based algorithm with other well-known scheduling algorithms, including MIN-MIN, MAX-MIN, Round Robin, FCFS, and MCT, PSO and C-PSO, where the proposed algorithm presented noticeable enhancements in the performance and cost in most situations.