QoS Aware Job Scheduling in a Cluster-Based Web Server for Multimedia Applications

We propose a cluster-based web server where a few computing nodes are separately reserved for high-performance computing applications, such as multimedia, SSL, and CGI. As an example application, we consider a multimedia server that dynamically generates video units to satisfy the bit rate and bandwidth requirements of a variety of clients. To perform QoS aware scheduling of multiple multimedia jobs on the computing servers, a two-step algorithm is proposed. The first step is to fairly schedule multimedia streams to satisfy each stream´s QoS requirement; and the second step is to balance the workload among heterogeneous computing nodes in the cluster. We propose a new Quota-based Adaptive CoScheduling (QACS) algorithm that greatly reduces delay jitter by eliminating the out-of-order departure for outgoing streams, as well as achieves high throughput in a heterogeneous cluster. Experimental results show that the proposed scheduling technique gives adequate QoS guarantees to multiple streams.