Solving Task Scheduling Problem in the Cloud Using a Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization Approach

Abstract

Synergistic confluence of pervasive sensing, computing, and networking is generating heterogeneous data at unprecedented scale and complexity. Cloud computing has emergered in the last two decades as a unique storage and computing resource to support a diverse assortment of applications. Numerous organizations are migrating to the cloud to store and process their information. When the cloud infrastructures and resources are insufficient to satisfy end-users requests, scheduling mechanisms are required. Task scheduling, especially in a distributed and heterogeneous system is an NP-hard problem since various task parameters must be considered for an appropriate scheduling. In this paper we propose a hybrid PSO and extremal optimization-based approach to resolve task scheduling in the cloud. The algorithm optimizes makespan which is an important criterion to schedule a number of tasks on different Virtual Machines. Experiments on synthetic and real-life workloads show the capability of the method to successfully schedule task and outperforms many known methods of the state of the art.