Efficient Grid Scheduling Through the Incremental Schedule‐based Approach

Abstract

Although Grid users demand good performance for their jobs, this requirement is often not satisfied by the widely used queue-based scheduling approaches. This article concentrates on the application of schedule-based methods that improve on both the service delivered to the user and the traditional objective of machine usage. Importantly, the interaction between the incremental application of these methods and the dynamic character of the problem allows reasonable runtimes to be achieved. Two new schedule-based methods that are designed to schedule dynamically arriving jobs on machines in a computational Grid are formally described in the article. The Earliest Gap -Earlier Deadline First (EG-EDF) policy fills the earliest gap in the known schedule with newly arriving jobs, incrementally building a new schedule. If the gap is not suitable for an incoming job, the EDF policy is used to modify the existing schedule. A Tabu search algorithm is used to further optimize the schedule by moving selected jobs into the earliest suitable gaps. The proposed incremental schedule-based methods are compared with some of the most common queue-based scheduling algorithms such as FCFS (First Come First Served), EASY backfilling (Extensible Argonne Scheduler sYstem), Flexible backfilling as well as with the nonincremental version of the EG-EDF schedule-based policy.

The Extension of Torque Scheduler Allowing the Use of Planning and Optimization in Grids

“…It finds the earliest suitable gap for the new jobs [21]. This is a common scenario used in several popular algorithms such as in EASY or Conservative backfilling [28].…”

“…Moreover, it is used as a decision maker during a schedule optimization routine. For this purpose we use a Tabu Searchbased optimization metaheuristic which we have proposed in our earlier work [21].…”

“…Several criteria can be used [22] for evaluation, allowing us to identify possible problems concerning job performance, the efficiency of resource utilization or, e.g., fairness issues. Next, an optimization procedure can be launched that tries to improve the quality of the schedule with respect to the applied optimization criteria [21,22].…”

“…use the classical queueing approach when scheduling jobs on the resources. On the other hand, in the past decade many works have shown that the use of a planning represents several advantages [34,21,28]. Unlike the queueing approach where scheduling decisions are taken in an ad hoc fashion often disregarding previous and future scheduling decisions, planning-based approach allows to make plans concerning job execution.…”

Hierarchical genetic-based grid scheduling with energy optimization

“…Based on the methodology presented in [14] and [23], and the main scheduling attributes presented in Fig. 2, the instance of the independent batch grid scheduling problem considered in this paper can be denoted by using the following expression:…”