Cloud computing has become a new paradigm by enabling on-demand provisioning of applications, platforms or computing resources for clients. Workflow scheduling has always been treated as one of the most challenging problems in clouds. Commercial clouds have been widely used in scientific research, such as biology, astronomy and weather forecasting. Certainly, it is very important for a cloud service provider to pursue the profits for the commercial essence of clouds. This is also significantly

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... mportant for the case of providing services to workflow tasks. In this paper, we address the issues of workflow scheduling in commercial clouds. This work takes the communication into account, which has always been ignored. And then, a topology-based workflow-scheduling algorithm named Resource Auction Algorithm (REAL) is proposed in the objective of getting more profits. The algorithm gives a good performance on searching for the optimum schedule for a sample workflow. Also, we find that there exists a certain resource amount, which gets the most profits to help us get more enthusiasm for further developing the research. Experimental results demonstrate that the analysis of the strategies for most profits is reasonable, and REAL gives a good performance on efficiently getting an optimized scheme with low computing complexity.