Practical Scheduling of Bag-of-Tasks Applications on Grids with Dynamic Resilience

Over the past decade, the grid has emerged as an attractive platform to tackle various large-scale problems, especially in science and engineering. One primary issue associated with the efficient and effective utilization of heterogeneous resources in a grid is scheduling. Grid scheduling involves a number of challenging issues, mainly due to the dynamic nature of the grid. There are only a handful of scheduling schemes for grid environments that realistically deal with this dynamic nature that have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, two novel scheduling algorithms, called the shared-input-data-based listing (SIL) algorithm and the multiple queues with duplication (MQD) algorithm for bag-of-tasks (BoT) applications in grid environments are proposed. The SIL algorithm targets scheduling data-intensive BoT (DBoT) applications, whereas the MQD algorithm deals with scheduling computationally intensive BoT (CBoT) applications. Their common and primary forte is that they make scheduling decisions without fully accurate performance prediction information. Another point to note is that both scheduling algorithms adopt task duplication as an attempt to reduce serious schedule increases. Our evaluation study employs a number of experiments with various simulation settings. The results show the practicability and competitiveness of our algorithms when compared to existing methods