Enabling Cost-Effective Resource Leases With Virtual Machines

Leasing resources for short periods of time can be of great value to many applications. Applications consisting of workflows of small tasks (such as Montage [5], GADU [6] or fMRI [7]), can be more efficiently scheduled by a workflow engine (e.g., Pegasus [8] or Swift [9]) when using leased resources than when each request must pass via a traditional scheduler. Interactive applications (where the user must use the application at a specific time), real-time applications, or applications requiring resource co-scheduling (e.g., to provision resources for a parallel job running across several sites) may further require an advance reservation capability.