Statistical prediction of task execution times through analytic benchmarking for scheduling in a heterogeneous environment

In this paper a method for estimating task execution times is presented, in order to facilitate dynamic scheduling in a heterogeneous metacomputing environment. Execution time is treated as a random variable and is statistically estimated from past observations. This method predicts the execution time as a function of several parameters of the input data, and does not require any direct information about the algorithms used by the tasks or the architecture of the machines. Techniques based upon the concept of analytic benchmarking/code profiling are used to accurately determine the performance differences between machines, allowing observations to be shared between machines. Experimental results using real data are presented