Executing Bag of Distributed Tasks on the Cloud : investigating the trade-offs between performance and cost

Abstract

This research is supported by the EPSRC grant ‘Working Together: Constraint Programming and Cloud Computing’ (EP/K015745/1), a Royal Society Industry Fellowship ‘Bringing Science to the Cloud’, an EPSRC Impact Acceleration Grant (IAA) and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Education Research Grant. Date of Acceptance: 20/09/2014Bag of Distributed Tasks (BoDT) can benefit from decentralised execution on the Cloud. However, there is a trade-off between the performance that can be achieved by employing a large number of Cloud VMs for the tasks and the monetary constraints that are often placed by a user. The research reported in this paper is motivated towards investigating this trade-off so that an optimal plan for deploying BoDT applications on the cloud can be generated. A heuristic algorithm, which considers the user's preference of performance and cost is proposed and implemented. The feasibility of the algorithm is demonstrated by generating execution plans for a sample application. The key result is that the algorithm generates optimal execution plans for the application over 91% of the time