Abstract
Recently, Cloud computing has emerged as one of the widely used platforms to provide compute, storage and analytics services to end-users and organizations on a pay-as-you-use basis, with high agility, availability, scalability, and resiliency. This enables individuals and organizations to have access to a large pool of high processing resources without the need for establishing a high-performance computing (HPC) platform. From the past few years, task scheduling in Cloud computing is reckoned as eminent recourse for researchers. However, task scheduling is considered an NP-hard problem. In this research work, we investigate and empirically compare some of the most prominent state-of-the-art scheduling heuristics in terms of Makespan, Average resource utilization (ARUR), Throughput, and Energy consumption. The comparison is then extended by evaluating the approaches in terms of individual VM level load imbalance. After extensive simulation, the comparative analysis has revealed that Task Aware Scheduling Algorithm (TASA) and Proactive Simulation-based Scheduling and Load Balancing (PSSLB) outperformed as compared to the rest of the approaches and seems to be optimal choice keeping in view the trade-of between the complexities involved and the performance achieved concerning Makespan, Throughput, resource utilization, and Energy consumption.