Value of information based scheduling of cloud computing resources

In this paper, we are considering applications where the output quality increases with the deployed computational power, a large class including applications ranging from weather prediction to financial modeling. We are proposing a computation scheduling that considers both the financial cost of the computation and the predicted financial benefit of the output, that is, its value of information (VoI). We model the proposed approach for an example of analyzing real-estate investment opportunities in a competitive environment. We show that by using the VoI-based scheduling algorithm, we can outperform minimalistic computing approaches, large but fixedly allocated data centers and cloud computing approaches that do not consider the VoI.