A Task Scheduling Algorithm Based on Replication for Maximizing Reliability on Heterogeneous Computing Systems

Over the past several years, a heterogeneous computing (HC) system has become more competative as a commercial computing platform than a homogeneous system. With the growing scale of HC systems, network failures become inevitable. To achieve high performance, communication reliability should be considered while designing reliability-aware task scheduling algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm called RMSR (Replication-based scheduling for Maximizing System Reliability), which incorporates task communication into system reliability. To maximize communication reliability, an improved algorithm which searches all optimal reliability communication paths for current tasks is proposed. During the task replication phase, the task reliability threshold is determined by users and each task has dynamic replicas. Our comparative studies based on randomly generated graphs show that our RMSR algorithm outperforms existing scheduling algorithms in terms of system reliability. Several factors affecting the performance are analyzed in the paper.