Toward efficient execution of data-intensive workflows

Workflows that consume and produce large amounts of data are being widely used in modern scientific computing and data processing pipelines. Scheduling of data-intensive workflows requires a careful management of data transfers between tasks, since network contention can significantly impact the workflow execution time. The paper presents and evaluates several scheduling algorithms, data transfer strategies and optimizations aimed at efficient execution of data-intensive workflows. The studied approaches reduce or completely avoid network contention by explicit scheduling of data transfers and incorporate several optimizations, such as data caching, chunked and peer-to-peer data transfers. The results of experimental study demonstrate that the relative performance of different approaches depends on the workflow properties, data staging strategy and system configuration. The proposed CAS-L1 heuristic with additional data transfer optimizations achieves the best results.