A Task Scheduling Approach for Cloud Environments Employing Evolutionary Algorithms

Abstract

One of the key challenges in the domain of cloud computing is task scheduling and estimation of cloud workloads for time critical applications pertaining to constrained cloud resources. While effective task scheduling is necessary for balancing the load, workload forecasting is necessary to plan in advance the requirements of cloud platforms based on previous data so as to effectively utilize cloud resources. Often it is challenging to gather sufficient information about the tasks and hence allocating the tasks to virtual machines (VMs) in the most optimal way is non-trivial. In this paper, a hybrid task scheduling approach is proposed based on evolutionary algorithms. The first approach is the amalgamation of bat and particle swarm optimization (PSO) techniques. The scheduling approach also combines the processing time preemption (PTP) approach to schedule the source intensive tasks which allows to reduce the response time of the proposed system.  The second approach is a machine learning based approach employing gradient descent with momentum (GDM). The evaluation of the proposed system has been done based on the response time and mean square error of the system.