This work presents sequential and parallel evolutionary algorithms (EAs) applied to the scheduling problem in heterogeneous computing environments, a NP-hard problem with capital relevance in distributed computing. These methods have been specifically designed to provide accurate and efficient solutions by using simple operators that allow them to be later extended for solving realistic problem instances arising in distributed heterogeneous computing (HC) and grid systems. The EAs were codified over MALLBA, a general-purpose library for combinatorial optimization. Efficient numerical results are reported in the experimental analysis performed on wellknown problem instances. The comparative study of scheduling methods shows that the parallel versions of the implemented evolutionary algorithms are able to achieve high problem solving efficacy, outperforming traditional scheduling heuristics and also improving over previous results already reported in the related literature.
Scheduling is a capital problem when using distributed heterogeneous computing (HC) and grid environments to solve complex problems. The scheduling problem in heterogeneous environments is NP-hard, so a significant effort has been made to develop efficient methods for solving the problem. However, few works have faced realistic grid-sized problem instances. This work presents a parallel CHC (pCHC) evolutionary algorithm codified over MALLBA, a general-purpose library for combinatorial optimization, for solving the scheduling problem in HC and grid environments. Efficient numerical results are reported in the experimental analysis performed on both a standard benchmark and a set of large-sized problem instances specially designed in this work. The comparative study shows that pCHC is able to achieve high problem solving efficacy, significantly improving over traditional deterministic scheduling methods, while also showing a good scalability behavior when solving large problem instances.
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