Alea – Grid Scheduling Simulation Environment

Abstract

Abstract. This work concentrates on the design of a system intended for study of advanced scheduling techniques for planning various types of jobs in a Grid environment. The solution is able to deal with common problems of the job scheduling in Grids like heterogeneity of jobs and resources, and dynamic runtime changes such as arrivals of new jobs. Our new simulator called Alea is based on the GridSim simulation toolkit which we extended to provide a simulation environment that supports simulation of varying Grid scheduling problems. To demonstrate the features of the GridSim environment, we implemented an experimental centralised Grid scheduler which uses advanced scheduling techniques for schedule generation. By now local search based algorithms and some dispatching rules were tested. The scheduler is capable to handle both static and dynamic situation. In the static case, all jobs are known in advance while the dynamic situation means that jobs appear in the system during simulation. In this case generated schedule is changing through time as some jobs are already finished while the new ones are arriving. Comparison of FCFS, local search and dispatching rules is presented for both cases and we demonstrate that the new local search based algorithm provides the best schedule while keeping the running time acceptable.

Optimal job packing, a backfill scheduling optimization for a cluster of workstations

“…We use the Alea parallel and distributed job scheduling simulator built on top of the GridSim simulator [19,20]. The Alea simulator is an event-based modular simulator, composed of independent entities like a centralized scheduler, job generator, job submission system, and the resources.…”

Service and Utility Oriented Distributed Computing Systems: Challenges and Opportunities for Modeling and Simulation Communities

“…Alea Grid Simulator [29], extended by Masaryk University (Czech Republic), is used to design and test complex scheduling algorithms for various Grid scenarios. Moreover, Alea simulates these algorithms in static and/or dynamic environments.…”

Modelling of a self-led critical friend topology in inter-cooperative grid communities

“…The MaGate simulator is implemented on GridSim [10] and Alea [11], it supports the modelling of a variety of essential grid components, such as grid jobs with various parameters, heterogeneous grid resources, and grid users. A grid scheduler named MaGate scheduler [12] is implemented by default within the MaGate simulator, which is capable of sharing received jobs with other remote resources to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall grid.…”