A survey of domains in workflow scheduling in computing infrastructures: Community and keyword analysis, emerging trends, and taxonomies

Abstract

Workflows are prevalent in today’s computing infrastructures as they support many domains. Different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of both users and providers makes workflow scheduling challenging. Meeting the challenge requires an overview of state-of-art in workflow scheduling. Sifting through literature to find the state-of-art can be daunting, for both newcomers and experienced researchers. Surveys are an excellent way to address questions regarding the different techniques, policies, emerging areas, and opportunities present, yet they rarely take a systematic approach and publish their tools and data on which they are based. Moreover, the communities behind these articles are rarely studied. We attempt to address these shortcomings in this work. We introduce and open-source an instrument used to combine and store article meta-data. Using this meta-data, we characterize and taxonomize the workflow scheduling community and four areas within workflow scheduling: (1) the workflow formalism, (2) workflow allocation, (3) resource provisioning, and (4) applications and services. In each characterization, we obtain important keywords overall and per year, identify keywords growing in importance, get insight into the structure and relations within each community, and perform a systematic literature survey per part to validate and complement our taxonomies

Topics & Concepts