Optimal task-level scheduling for cloud based multimedia applications

As an emerging computing paradigm, cloud computing has been increasingly used in multimedia applications. One fundamental challenge for application providers is how to effectively schedule multimedia tasks to multiple virtual machines for distributed processing. In this paper, we study task-level scheduling problem for cloud based multimedia applications. Specifically, we introduce a directed acyclic graph to model precedence constraints among tasks. Based on the model, we study the optimal task scheduling problem for the sequential, the parallel, and the mixed structures, respectively. Moreover, we propose a heuristic to perform the near optimal task scheduling in a practical way. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheduling scheme can optimally assign tasks to virtual machines to minimize the execution time.