A genetic algorithm for data-aware approximate workflow scheduling

Data placement in complex scientific workflows gradually attracts more attention since the large amounts of data generated by these workflows significantly increases the turnaround time of the end-to-end application. It is almost impossible to make an optimal scheduling for the end-to-end workflow without considering the intermediate data movement. In order to reduce the complexity of the workflow-scheduling problem, most of the existing work constrains the problem space by some unrealistic assumptions, which result in non-optimal scheduling in practice. In this study, we propose a genetic data-aware algorithm for the end-to-end workflow scheduling problem, which performs very close to the optimal solution.