Title: Scheduling policy design for autonomic systems

Authors: Robert Glaubius, Terry Tidwell, Christopher D. Gill, William D. Smart

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA

Abstract: Scheduling the execution of multiple concurrent tasks on shared resources such as CPUs and network links is essential to ensuring the reliable operation of many autonomic systems. Well-known techniques such as rate-monotonic scheduling can offer rigorous timing and preemption guarantees, but only under assumptions (i.e. a fixed set of tasks with well-known execution times and invocation rates) that do not hold in many autonomic systems. New hierarchical scheduling techniques are better suited to enforce the more flexible execution constraints and enforcement mechanisms that are required for autonomic systems, but a rigorous and efficient foundation for verifying and enforcing concurrency and timing guarantees is still needed for these approaches. This paper summarises our previous work on addressing these challenges, on Markov decision process-based scheduling policy design and on wrapping repeated structure of the scheduling state spaces involved into a more efficient model, and presents a new algorithm called expanding state policy iteration (ESPI), that allows us to compute the optimal policy for a wrapped state model.

Keywords: autonomic computing; policy iteration; state space reduction; reliability; concurrent tasks; shared resources; Markov decision scheduling; process-based scheduling; scheduling policy design; wrapping repeated structure; expanding state policy iteration; wrapped state models.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAACS.2009.026786

International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems, 2009 Vol.2 No.3, pp.276 - 296

Published online: 26 Jun 2009 *

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