Task scheduling algorithms for multi-cloud systems: allocation-aware approach

Cloud computing has gained enormous popularity for on-demand services on a pay-per-use basis. However, a single data center may be limited in providing such services, particularly in the peak demand time as it may not have unlimited resource capacity. Therefore, multi-cloud environment has been introduced in which multiple clouds can be integrated together to provide a unified service in a collaborative fashion. However, task scheduling in such environment is much more challenging than that is used in the single cloud environment. In this paper, we propose three allocation-aware task scheduling algorithms for a multi-cloud environment. The algorithms are based on the traditional Min-Min and Max-Min algorithm and extended for multi-cloud environment. All the algorithms undergo three common phases, namely matching, allocating and scheduling to fit them in the multi-cloud environment. We perform extensive simulations on the proposed algorithms and test with various benchmark and synthetic datasets. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms in terms of makespan, average cloud utilization and throughput and compare the results with the existing algorithms in such system. The comparison results clearly demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithms.