Cloud computing is a suitable platform to execute the deadline-constrained scientific workflows which are typical big data applications and often require many hours to finish. Moreover, the problem of energy consumption has become one of the major concerns in clouds. In this paper, we present a cost and energy aware scheduling (CEAS) algorithm for cloud scheduler to minimize the execution cost of workflow and reduce the energy consumption while meeting the deadline constraint. The CEAS algorithm consists of five sub-algorithms. First, we use the VM selection algorithm which applies the concept of cost utility to map tasks to their optimal virtual machine (VM) types by the sub-makespan constraint. Then, two tasks merging methods are employed to reduce execution cost and energy consumption of workflow. Further, In order to reuse the idle VM instances which have been leased, the VM reuse policy is also proposed. Finally, the scheme of slack time reclamation is utilized to save energy of leased VM instances. According to the time complexity analysis, we conclude that the time complexity of each sub-algorithm is polynomial. The CEAS algorithm is evaluated using Cloudsim and four real-world scientific workflow applications, which demonstrates that it outperforms the related well-known approaches.

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It is a big challenge for resource-limited mobile devices (MDs) to execute various complex and energy-consumed mobile applications. Fortunately, as a novel computing paradigm, edge computing (MEC) can provide abundant computing resources to execute all or parts of the tasks of MDs and thereby can greatly reduce the energy of MD and improve the QoS of applications. However, offloading workflow tasks to the MEC servers are liable to external security threats (e.g., snooping, alteration). In this paper, we propose a security and energy efficient computation offloading (SEECO) strategy for service workflows in MEC environment, the goal of which is to optimize the energy consumption under the risk probability and deadline constraints. First, we build a security overhead model to measure the execution time of security services. Then, we formulate the computation offloading problem by incorporating the security, energy consumption and execution time of workflow application. Finally, based on the genetic algorithm (GA), the corresponding coding strategies of SEECO are devised by considering tasks execution order and location and security services selection.Extensive experiments with the variety of workflow parameters demonstrate that SEECO strategy can achieve the security and energy efficiency for the mobile applications.

Intestinal flora provides an important contribution to the development of pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB). We performed a cross-sectional study in 52 healthy controls (HCs) and 83 patients with untreated active PTB to assess the differences in their microbiomic and metabolic profiles in faeces via V3-V4 16S rRNA gene sequencing and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Patients with PTB had considerable reductions in phylogenetic alpha diversity and the production of short-chain fatty acids, dysbiosis of the intestinal flora and alterations in the faecal metabolomics composition compared with HCs. Significant alterations in faecal metabolites were associated with changes in the relative abundance of specific genera. Our study describes the imbalance of the gut microbiota and altered faecal metabolomics profiles in patients with PTB; the results indicate that the gut microbiota and faecal metabolomic profiles can be used as potential preventive and therapeutic targets for PTB.