An Efficient Algorithm for Scheduling Jobs in Volunteer Computing Platforms

Abstract

International audienceWe propose in this paper a new algorithm for scheduling independent jobs in volunteer computing platforms. In such platforms, the resources are not continuously available over time. Moreover, the beginning and finishing times of the resource availability periods are subject to some uncertainties since the machines are directly administrated by the owners (and thus, there is no global centralized control). The performance of the applications is achieved by a suitable adaptation of the algorithms to the volunteer environments. We propose an efficient method that optimizes the performance and reduces the impact of disturbances by means of stability. Stability gives the guarantee that the disturbed solution does not differ too much from the initial solution. It is obtained on the basis of a reputation mechanism of the resources that makes the scheduling decisions more adequate. The quality of our algorithm is demonstrated by a campaign of experiments using simulations of actual traces of BOINC where the results are compared to other existing reference algorithms

Task Assignment Algorithm Based on Trust in Volunteer Computing Platforms

“…In the context of this paper, we define the trust value as the credibility that a VN can provide the expected availability time. Moreover, the study in Reference [32] shows that the higher trust value of the VN, the closer its expected availability time and the actual availability time are, so we associate a trust value with each VN in our reliability model to reduce the disturbance and improve the performance in task assignment.…”

“…The closest work to our study is two novel task scheduling algorithms proposed by Essafi et al [32]. These two algorithms are called the HEFT-AC algorithm, which mainly modifies the HEFT algorithm to make it suitable for the volunteer computing platforms and the HEFT-ACU algorithm associates the reputation value of each VN to improve reliability.…”

Optimizing the Performance of a Microservice-Based Application Deployed on User-Provided Devices

“…Volunteer computing and Grid computing are well established areas of research with many contributions. Some of them are focused on performance considerations [3], [9]. In such a context, the performance is measured as task throughput.…”

Research on the Task Assignment Problem with Maximum Benefits in Volunteer Computing Platforms

“…We proposed a new task assignment algorithm, which aimed at maximizing the benefits of the VCPs under deadline constraints and considering the reliability. The studies most related to our work are the following [22,23].…”

“…In the work [22], the authors studied the problem of how to assign tasks when the disturbances of the workers' available times occurred and proposed two algorithms based on the heterogeneous earliest-finish-time (HEFT) [10]. One was the HEFT with availability constraint (HEFT-AC) algorithm, and the other was the HEFT AC with the unavailability (HEFT-ACU) algorithm.…”