Data Replication-Based Scheduling in Cloud Computing Environment

High-performance computing and vast storage are two key factors required for executing data-intensive applications. In comparison with traditional distributed systems like data grid, cloud computing provides these factors in a more affordable, scalable and elastic platform. Furthermore, accessing data files is critical for performing such applications. Sometimes accessing data becomes a bottleneck for the whole cloud workflow system and decreases the performance of the system dramatically. Job scheduling and data replication are two important techniques which can enhance the performance of data-intensive applications. It is wise to integrate these techniques into one framework for achieving a single objective. In this paper, we integrate data replication and job scheduling with the aim of reducing response time by reduction of data access time in cloud computing environment. This is called data replication-based scheduling (DRBS). Simulation results show the effectiveness of our algorithm in comparison with well-known algorithms such as random and round-robin.