Scheduling grid applications with software requirements

Grid computing is a paradigm to execute complex distributed applications. Considering that the aim is to minimize the makespan of applications, schedulers exploit the best possible way to use shared resources. Applications have requirements which call for customized environments for their execution. One way to provide such environments is to use virtualization on demand. This paper presents two schedulers based on integer linear programming which schedule virtual machines (VMs) in grid resources and tasks on these VMs. The schedulers differ from previous work by the joint scheduling of tasks and VMs and by considering the impact of the network on the quality of the schedule. Experiments show the efficacy and efficiency of the schedulers in scenarios with different network configurations.