An Adaptive Workflow Scheduling Scheme Based on an Estimated Data Processing Rate for Next Generation Sequencing in Cloud Computing

The cloud environment makes it possible to analyze large data sets in a scalable computing infrastructure. In the bioinformatics field, the applications are composed of the complex workflow tasks, which require huge data storage as well as a computing-intensive parallel workload. Many approaches have been introduced in distributed solutions. However, they focus on static resource provisioning with a batch-processing scheme in a local computing farm and data storage. In the case of a large-scale workflow system, it is inevitable and valuable to outsource the entire or a part of their tasks to public clouds for reducing resource costs. The problems, however, occurred at the transfer time for huge dataset as well as there being an unbalanced completion time of different problem sizes. In this paper, we propose an adaptive resource-provisioning scheme that includes run-time data distribution and collection services for hiding the data transfer time. The proposed adaptive resource-provisioning scheme optimizes the allocation ratio of computing elements to the different datasets in order to minimize the total makespan under resource constraints. We conducted the experiments with a well-known sequence alignment algorithm and the results showed that the proposed scheme is efficient for the cloud environment.