Budget Estimation and Control for Bag-of-Tasks Scheduling in Clouds

Commercial cloud offerings, such as Amazon's EC2, let users allocate compute resources on demand, charging based on reserved time intervals. While this gives great flexibility to elastic applications, users lack guidance for choosing between multiple offerings, in order to complete their computations within given budget constraints. In this work, we present BaTS, our budget-constrained scheduler. Using a small task sample, BaTS can estimate costs and makespan for a given bag on different cloud offerings. It provides the user with a choice of options before execution and then schedules the bag according to the user's preferences. BaTS requires no a-priori information about task completion times. We evaluate BaTS by emulating different cloud environments on the DAS-3 multi-cluster system. Our results show that BaTS correctly estimates budget and makespan for the scenarios investigated; the user-selected schedule is then executed within the given budget limitations. © 2011 World Scientific Publishing Company.