On the Improvement of Grid Resource Utilization: Preventive and Reactive Rescheduling Approaches

  • Authors:

  • Luis Tomás;Blanca Caminero;Carmen Carrión;Agustín C. Caminero

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computing Systems, University of Castilla---La Mancha, Albacete, Spain;Department of Computing Systems, University of Castilla---La Mancha, Albacete, Spain;Department of Computing Systems, University of Castilla---La Mancha, Albacete, Spain;Department of Communication and Control Systems, National University of Distance Education, Albacete, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Grid Computing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

One of the key motivations of computational and data Grids is the ability to make coordinated use of heterogeneous computing resources which are geographically dispersed. However, the provision of Quality of Service (QoS) to Grid users is still a challenge that needs the attention of the research community. Reservation of resources in advance has been proposed as a way of providing QoS guarantees but they may not always be possible. For this reason, this work focuses on meta-scheduling of jobs in advance as a way of enhancing the provision of QoS. Thereby, jobs are scheduled some time before they are actually executed, but no resource is physically reserved. One of the drawbacks of this scenario is that fragmentation may appear in resources (free time slots but not large enough to execute a job) which leads to poor resource utilization. For that reason, two techniques have been developed to tackle poor resource utilization, whose main idea consists of rescheduling already scheduled jobs so that a new incoming job can be allocated. These rescheduling techniques have been implemented within a middleware that supports meta-scheduling in advance, which relies on the GridWay meta-scheduler. Finally, these proposals have been tested using a real testbed involving heterogeneous computing resources distributed across different national organizations, with different experiments showing their efficiency.