An energy-efficient, QoS-aware and cost-effective scheduling approach for real-time workflow applications in cloud computing systems utilizing DVFS and approximate computations

Abstract Green cloud computing attracts significant attention from both academia and industry. One of the major challenges involved, is to provide a high level of Quality of Service (QoS) in a cost-effective way for the end users and in an energy-efficient manner for the cloud providers. Towards this direction, this paper presents an energy-efficient, QoS-aware and cost-effective scheduling strategy for real-time workflow applications in cloud computing systems. The proposed approach utilizes per-core Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) on the underlying heterogeneous multi-core processors, as well as approximate computations, in order to fill in schedule gaps. At the same time, it takes into account the effects of input error on the processing time of the component tasks. Our goal is to provide timeliness and energy efficiency by trading off result precision, while keeping the result quality of the completed jobs at an acceptable standard and the monetary cost required for the execution of the jobs at a reasonable level. The proposed scheduling heuristic is compared to two other baseline policies, under the impact of various QoS requirements. The simulation experiments reveal that our approach outperforms the other examined policies, providing promising results.