Real-Time Tasks Oriented Energy-Aware Scheduling in Virtualized Clouds

Energy conservation is a major concern in cloud computing systems because it can bring several important benefits such as reducing operating costs, increasing system reliability, and prompting environmental protection. Meanwhile, power-aware scheduling approach is a promising way to achieve that goal. At the same time, many real-time applications, e.g., signal processing, scientific computing have been deployed in clouds. Unfortunately, existing energy-aware scheduling algorithms developed for clouds are not real-time task oriented, thus lacking the ability of guaranteeing system schedulability. To address this issue, we first propose in this paper a novel rolling-horizon scheduling architecture for real-time task scheduling in virtualized clouds. Then a task-oriented energy consumption model is given and analyzed. Based on our scheduling architecture, we develop a novel energy-aware scheduling algorithm named EARH for real-time, aperiodic, independent tasks. The EARH employs a rolling-horizon optimization policy and can also be extended to integrate other energy-aware scheduling algorithms. Furthermore, we propose two strategies in terms of resource scaling up and scaling down to make a good trade-off between task’s schedulability and energy conservation. Extensive simulation experiments injecting random synthetic tasks as well as tasks following the last version of the Google cloud tracelogs are conducted to validate the superiority of our EARH by comparing it with some baselines. The experimental results show that EARH significantly improves the scheduling quality of others and it is suitable for real-time task scheduling in virtualized clouds.