Towards Efficient Bounds on Completion Time and Resource Provisioning for Scheduling Workflows on Heterogeneous Processing Systems

Abstract

Compute intensive applications featured as workflows necessitate Heterogeneous Processing Systems (HPS) for attaining high performance to minimize the turnaround time. Efficient scheduling of the workflow tasks is paramount to attain higher potentials of HPS and is a challenging NP-Complete problem. In the present work, Branch and Bound (BnB) strategy is applied to optimally schedule the workflow tasks. The proposed bounds are tighter, simpler and less complex than the existing bounds and the upper bound is closer to the exact solution. Moreover, the bounds on the resource provisioning are devised to execute the workflows in the minimum possible time and optimally utilize the resources. The performance of the proposed BnB strategy is evaluated on a suite of benchmark workflows. The experimental results reveal that the proposed BnB strategy improved the optimal solutions compared to the existing heuristic scheduling algorithms for more than 20 percent of the cases and generated better schedules over 7 percent for 82.6 percent of the cases.