Title: Self-adaptive task allocation and scheduling of meta-tasks in non-dedicated heterogeneous computing

Authors: Ming Wu, Xian-He Sun

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA

Abstract: The efforts to construct a national scale grid computing environment have brought unprecedented computing capacity and complexity. Exploiting this complex infrastructure requires efficient middleware to support the execution of distributed applications, which presents the challenge of how to schedule tasks in shared heterogeneous systems. Most existing scheduling systems are based on predetermined estimation of task completion time and resources availability. They may not provide appropriate scheduling if the underlying computing resources present an abnormal usage pattern during an application execution. For solving long-running applications in a large-scale grid environment, abnormal usage of some resource may not be uncommon. We have proposed the development of the Grid Harvest Service (GHS) performance evaluation and task scheduling system in our previous work. In this study, we present a novel dynamic self-adaptive scheduling algorithm and its implementation under GHS. Scheduling and rescheduling algorithms and mechanisms are carefully investigated. Experimental results show that, equipped with these new scheduling mechanisms, GHS outperforms existing systems considerably in scheduling large applications in a non-dedicated heterogeneous environment.

Keywords: task scheduling; performance prediction; shared heterogeneous system; grid computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2004.008903

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2004 Vol.2 No.2/3/4, pp.186 - 197

Published online: 02 Feb 2006 *

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