A Truthful Mechanism for Scheduling and Pricing Pleasingly Parallel Jobs in a Service Cloud

As more and more users outsource their job executions to service clouds, effective job scheduling and pricing models are needed to solve resource and service competitions between users. Considering the particularity of scheduling and pricing problems in a service cloud whose goal is generally social welfare maximization, current commonly used models, such as fixed-pricing schemes, have obvious shortcomings and thus are unfeasible. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a randomized mechanism to schedule and charge job executions in service clouds. Our proposed mechanism can schedule jobs in a flexible way to achieve approximate social welfare maximization while guaranteeing non-preemption. Flexibility means the number of instances which are allocated to a job can be changed over time. The mechanism is truthful in expectation, computationally efficient and individually rational. The theoretical analysis shows that our mechanism can achieve an expected social welfare approximation ratio α, which can be 2 in some situations. Extensive simulations show that our proposed mechanism can efficiently solve the job scheduling problem in service clouds.