Increasing adoption of scientific workflows in the community has urged for the development of multi-tenant platforms that provides these workflows execution as a service. Workflow as a Service (WaaS) concept has been brought up by researchers to address the future design of Workflow Management Systems (WMS) that can serve a large number of users from a single point of service. This platform differs from a traditional WMS in handling the workload of workflows at runtime. A traditional WMS is usually designed to execute a single workflow in a dedicated process while the WaaS platforms enhance the process by exploiting multiple workflows execution in a resource-sharing environment model. In this paper, we explore a novel resource-sharing policy to improve system utilization and to fulfill various Quality of Service (QoS) requirements from multiple users. We propose an Elastic Budget-constrained resource Provisioning and Scheduling algorithm for Multiple workflows designed for WaaS platforms that is able to reduce the computational overhead by encouraging resource-sharing policy to minimize workflows' makespan while meeting user-defined budget. Our experiments show that the EBPSM algorithm is able to utilize the resource-sharing policy to achieve higher performance in terms of minimizing the makespan compared to the state-of-the-art budget-constraint scheduling algorithm.
The use of the container for deploying scientific workflows has been intensively researched. Examples include the work by @cite_36 that deployed a TOSCA-based workflow https: github.com ditrit workflows using Docker https: www.docker.com container on e-Science Central platform https: www.esciencecentral.org . Although their work is done on a single host VM, the result shows promising future scientific workflows reproducibility that is made possible using container technology. A similar result is presented by @cite_13 that convinces performance nativity and high flexibility of deploying scientific workflows using the Docker container. Finally, the adCFS @cite_33 algorithm is designed to schedule containerized scientific workflows that encourage the CPU-sharing policy using a Markov-chain model to assign the appropriate CPU weight for containers. Those solutions are the early development of containerized scientific workflows on a single workflow execution. Their results show high feasibility to utilize container technology for efficiently bundling software configurations for workflows that are being proposed for WaaS platforms.
@cite_36 @cite_13 @cite_33
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Scientific workflows are increasingly containerised, which requires rethinking central processing unit (CPU) sharing policies to accommodate different workload types. However, container engines running scientific workflows struggle to share the CPU fairly, as workload characteristics are not taken into account. This paper proposes a sharing policy called the Adaptive Completely Fair Scheduling policy (adCFS), which considers the future state of CPU usage and proactively shares CPU cycles between various containers based on their corresponding workload metrics (e.g., CPU usage, task runtime, #tasks). adCFS estimates the weight of workload characteristics and redistributes the CPU based on the corresponding weights. The Markov chain model is used to predict CPU state use, and the adCFS policy is triggered to dynamically allocate containers to the proper CPU portions. Experimental results show enhanced container CPU response time for those containers that run heavy and large jobs: these display 12 faster response time compared with the default CFS (Completely Fair Scheduler). adCFS therefore enhances CFS by considering workload metrics, which leads to the CPU being shared fairly when it is fully used. Scientific workflows are increasingly being migrated to the Cloud. However, workflow developers face the problem of which Cloud to choose and, more importantly, how to avoid vendor lock-in. This is because there are a range of Cloud platforms, each with different functionality and interfaces. In this paper we propose a solution - a system that allows workflows to be portable across a range of Clouds. This portability is achieved through a new framework for building, dynamically deploying and enacting workflows. It combines the TOSCA specification language and container-based virtualization. TOSCA is used to build a reusable and portable description of a workflow which can be automatically deployed and enacted using Docker containers. We describe a working implementation of our framework and evaluate it using a set of existing scientific workflows that illustrate the flexibility of the proposed approach. Cloud computing is gaining tremendous momentum in both academia and industry. In this context, we define the term "Cloud Workflow" as the specification, execution and provenance tracking of large-scale scientific workflows, as well as the management of data and computing resources to support the execution of large-scale scientific workflows in the Cloud. In this paper, we first analyze the gap between these two complementary technologies, and what it means to bring Clouds and workflows together. Then, we present the key challenges in supporting Cloud workflows, and present our reference framework for scientific workflow management in the Cloud. Last we present our experience in integrating a scientific workflow management system-Swift into the Cloud. We discuss the performance of cluster provisioning within the OpenNebula Cloud platform, the Eucalyptus Cloud platform and Amazon EC2, and we demonstrate the capability and efficiency of the integration using a NASA MODIS image processing workflow and the Montage image mosaic workflow.Note to practitioners. Scientific workflow management plays a very important role for scientific computing and application coordination, while Cloud computing offers scalability and resource on-demand. We devise autonomous methods to integrate scientific workflow management systems with Cloud platforms and also provision resources for large scale workflows, which can facilitate scientists to easily manage their workflows in the Cloud, and take advantage of large scale Cloud resources. There are a few integration options and many challenges in the process, and the experience we gain will help researchers in migrating their workflow management systems and workflow applications into the Cloud. We analyze the major challenges of running scientific workflows on the Cloud.We propose a reference framework to standardize the integration.The implementation experience proves that the framework is feasible and extendible.Cluster-recycling mechanism can improve the resource provisioning efficiency. High Performance Computing (HPC) applications require systems with environments for maximum use of limited resources to facilitate efficient computations. However, these systems are faced with a large trade-off between efficient resource allocation and minimum execution times for the applications executed on them. Also, deploying applications in newer environments is exacting. To alleviate this challenge, container-based systems are recently being deployed to reduce the trade-off. In this paper, we investigate container-based technology as an efficient virtualization technology for running high performance scientific applications. We select Docker as the container-based technology for our test bed. We execute autodock3, a molecular modeling simulation software mostly used for Protein-ligand docking, in Docker containers and VMs created using OpenStack. We compare the execution times of the docking process in both Docker containers and in VMs.