Fault-tolerant Workflow Scheduling using Spot Instances on Clouds

Scientific workflows are used to model applications of high throughput computation and complex large scale data analysis. In recent years, Cloud computing is fast evolving as the target platform for such applications among researchers. Furthermore, new pricing models have been pioneered by Cloud providers that allow users to provision resources and to use them in an efficient manner with significant cost reductions. In this paper, we propose a scheduling algorithm that schedules tasks on Cloud resources using two different pricing models (spot and on-demand instances) to reduce the cost of execution whilst meeting the workflow deadline. The proposed algorithm is fault tolerant against the premature termination of spot instances and also robust against performance variations of Cloud resources. Experimental results demonstrate that our heuristic reduces up to 70% execution cost as against using only on-demand instances.