Cloud scheduling with setup cost

In this paper, we investigate the problem of online task scheduling of jobs such as MapReduce jobs, Monte Carlo simulations and generating search index from web documents, on cloud computing infrastructures. We consider the virtualized cloud computing setup comprising machines that host multiple identical virtual machines (VMs) under pay-as-you-go charging, and that booting a VM requires a constant setup time. The cost of job computation depends on the number of VMs activated, and the VMs can be activated and shutdown on demand. We propose a new bi-objective algorithm to minimize the maximum task delay, and the total cost of the computation. We study both the clairvoyant case, where the duration of each task is known upon its arrival, and the more realistic non-clairvoyant case.