It is becoming increasingly attractive to execute workflows in the cloud, as the cloud environment enables scientific applications to utilize elastic computing resources on demand. However, despite being a key to efficiently managing application execution in the cloud, traditional workflow scheduling algorithms face significant challenges in the cloud environment. The gradient-based optimizer (GBO) is a newly proposed evolutionary algorithm with a search engine based on the Newton’s method. It employs a set of vectors to search in the solution space. This study designs a gradient-based scheduler by using GBO for workflow scheduling to minimize the usage costs of workflows under given deadline constraints. Extensive experiments are conducted on well-known scientific workflows of different sizes and types using WorkflowSim. The experimental results show that the proposed scheduling algorithm outperforms five other state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both the constraint satisfiability and cost optimization, thereby verifying its advantages in addressing workflow scheduling problems.

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