Scientific Workflows Management and Scheduling in Cloud Computing: Taxonomy, Prospects, and Challenges

Cloud computing provides solutions to a large number of organizations in terms of hosting systems and services. The services provided by cloud computing are broadly used for business and scientific applications. Business applications are task oriented applications and structured into business workflows. Whereas, scientific applications are data oriented and compute intensive applications and structured into scientific workflows. Scientific workflows are managed through scientific workflows management and scheduling systems. Recently, a significant amount of research is carried out on management and scheduling of scientific workflow applications. This study presents a comprehensive review on scientific workflows management and scheduling in cloud computing. It provides an overview of existing surveys on scientific workflows management systems. It presents a taxonomy of scientific workflow applications and characteristics. It shows the working of existing scientific workflows management and scheduling techniques including resource scheduling, fault-tolerant scheduling and energy efficient scheduling. It provides discussion on various performance evaluation parameters along with definition and equation. It also provides discussion on various performance evaluation platforms used for evaluation of scientific workflows management and scheduling strategies. It finds evaluation platforms used for the evaluation of scientific workflows techniques based on various performance evaluation parameters. It also finds various design goals for presenting new scientific workflow management techniques. Finally, it explores the open research issues that require attention and high importance.