Efficient resource management using advance reservations for heterogeneous Grids

Support for advance reservations of resources plays a key role in Grid resource management as it enables the system to meet user expectations with respect to time requirements and temporal dependence of applications, increases predictability of the system and enables co- allocation of resources. Despite these attractive features, adoption of advance reservations is limited mainly due to the fact that related algorithms are typically complex and fail to scale to large and loaded systems. In this work we consider two aspects of advance reservations. First, we investigate the impact of heterogeneity on Grid resource management when advance reservations are supported. Second, we employ techniques from computational geometry to develop an efficient heterogeneity-aware scheduling algorithm. Our main finding is that Grids may benefit from high levels of resource heterogeneity, independently of the total system capacity. Our results show that our algorithm performs well across several user and system performance and overcome the lack of scalability and adaptability of existing mechanisms.