13,256 research outputs found
A fast, effective local search for scheduling independent jobs in heterogeneous computing environments
The efficient scheduling of independent computational jobs in a heterogeneous computing (HC) environment is an important problem in domains such as grid computing. Finding optimal schedules for such an environment is (in general) an NP-hard problem, and so heuristic approaches must be used. Work with other NP-hard problems has shown that solutions found by heuristic algorithms can often be improved by applying local search procedures to the solution found. This paper describes a simple but effective local search procedure for scheduling independent jobs in HC environments which, when combined with fast construction heuristics, can find shorter schedules on benchmark problems than other solution techniques found in the literature, and in significantly less time
Hybrid Meta-heuristic Algorithms for Static and Dynamic Job Scheduling in Grid Computing
The term ’grid computing’ is used to describe an infrastructure that connects geographically
distributed computers and heterogeneous platforms owned by multiple organizations
allowing their computational power, storage capabilities and other resources to be selected
and shared. Allocating jobs to computational grid resources in an efficient manner is one
of the main challenges facing any grid computing system; this allocation is called job
scheduling in grid computing. This thesis studies the application of hybrid meta-heuristics
to the job scheduling problem in grid computing, which is recognized as being one of
the most important and challenging issues in grid computing environments. Similar to
job scheduling in traditional computing systems, this allocation is known to be an NPhard
problem. Meta-heuristic approaches such as the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Variable
Neighbourhood Search (VNS) and Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) have all proven their
effectiveness in solving different scheduling problems. However, hybridising two or more
meta-heuristics shows better performance than applying a stand-alone approach. The new
high level meta-heuristic will inherit the best features of the hybridised algorithms, increasing
the chances of skipping away from local minima, and hence enhancing the overall
performance. In this thesis, the application of VNS for the job scheduling problem in grid
computing is introduced. Four new neighbourhood structures, together with a modified
local search, are proposed. The proposed VNS is hybridised using two meta-heuristic
methods, namely GA and ACO, in loosely and strongly coupled fashions, yielding four
new sequential hybrid meta-heuristic algorithms for the problem of static and dynamic
single-objective independent batch job scheduling in grid computing. For the static version
of the problem, several experiments were carried out to analyse the performance of the
proposed schedulers in terms of minimising the makespan using well known benchmarks.
The experiments show that the proposed schedulers achieved impressive results compared
to other traditional, heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches selected from the bibliography.
To model the dynamic version of the problem, a simple simulator, which uses
the rescheduling technique, is designed and new problem instances are generated, by
using a well-known methodology, to evaluate the performance of the proposed hybrid
schedulers. The experimental results show that the use of rescheduling provides significant
improvements in terms of the makespan compared to other non-rescheduling approaches
A hybrid ant algorithm for scheduling independent jobs in heterogeneous computing environments
The efficient scheduling of independent computational jobs in a heterogeneous computing (HC) environment is an important problem in domains such as grid computing. Finding optimal schedules for such an environment is (in general) an NP-hard problem, and so heuristic approaches must be used. In this paper we describe an ant colony optimisation (ACO) algorithm that, when combined with local and tabu search, can find shorter schedules on benchmark problems than other techniques found in the literature
A hyper-heuristic for adaptive scheduling in computational grids
In this paper we present the design and implementation of an hyper-heuristic for efficiently scheduling independent jobs in computational grids. An efficient scheduling of jobs to grid resources depends on many parameters, among others, the characteristics of the resources and jobs (such as computing capacity, consistency of computing, workload, etc.). Moreover, these characteristics change over time due to the dynamic nature of grid environment, therefore the planning of jobs to resources should be adaptively done. Existing ad hoc scheduling methods (batch and immediate mode) have shown their efficacy for certain types of resource and job characteristics. However, as stand alone methods, they are not able to produce the best planning of jobs to resources for different types of Grid resources and job characteristics. In this work we have designed and implemented a hyper-heuristic that uses a set of ad hoc (immediate and batch mode) scheduling methods to provide the scheduling of jobs to Grid resources according to the Grid and job characteristics. The hyper-heuristic is a high level algorithm, which examines the state and characteristics of the Grid system (jobs and resources), and selects and applies the ad hoc method that yields the best planning of jobs. The resulting hyper-heuristic based scheduler can be thus used to develop network-aware applications that need efficient planning of jobs to resources. The hyper-heuristic has been tested and evaluated in a dynamic setting through a prototype of a Grid simulator. The experimental evaluation showed the usefulness of the hyper-heuristic for planning of jobs to resources as compared to planning without knowledge of the resource and job characteristics.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Task Scheduling on the Cloud with Hard Constraints
Scheduling Bag-of-Tasks (BoT) applications on the cloud can be more
challenging than grid and cluster environ- ments. This is because a user may
have a budgetary constraint or a deadline for executing the BoT application in
order to keep the overall execution costs low. The research in this paper is
motivated to investigate task scheduling on the cloud, given two hard
constraints based on a user-defined budget and a deadline. A heuristic
algorithm is proposed and implemented to satisfy the hard constraints for
executing the BoT application in a cost effective manner. The proposed
algorithm is evaluated using four scenarios that are based on the trade-off
between performance and the cost of using different cloud resource types. The
experimental evaluation confirms the feasibility of the algorithm in satisfying
the constraints. The key observation is that multiple resource types can be a
better alternative to using a single type of resource.Comment: Visionary Track of the IEEE 11th World Congress on Services (IEEE
SERVICES 2015
Dominant Resource Fairness in Cloud Computing Systems with Heterogeneous Servers
We study the multi-resource allocation problem in cloud computing systems
where the resource pool is constructed from a large number of heterogeneous
servers, representing different points in the configuration space of resources
such as processing, memory, and storage. We design a multi-resource allocation
mechanism, called DRFH, that generalizes the notion of Dominant Resource
Fairness (DRF) from a single server to multiple heterogeneous servers. DRFH
provides a number of highly desirable properties. With DRFH, no user prefers
the allocation of another user; no one can improve its allocation without
decreasing that of the others; and more importantly, no user has an incentive
to lie about its resource demand. As a direct application, we design a simple
heuristic that implements DRFH in real-world systems. Large-scale simulations
driven by Google cluster traces show that DRFH significantly outperforms the
traditional slot-based scheduler, leading to much higher resource utilization
with substantially shorter job completion times
Managing Uncertainty: A Case for Probabilistic Grid Scheduling
The Grid technology is evolving into a global, service-orientated
architecture, a universal platform for delivering future high demand
computational services. Strong adoption of the Grid and the utility computing
concept is leading to an increasing number of Grid installations running a wide
range of applications of different size and complexity. In this paper we
address the problem of elivering deadline/economy based scheduling in a
heterogeneous application environment using statistical properties of job
historical executions and its associated meta-data. This approach is motivated
by a study of six-month computational load generated by Grid applications in a
multi-purpose Grid cluster serving a community of twenty e-Science projects.
The observed job statistics, resource utilisation and user behaviour is
discussed in the context of management approaches and models most suitable for
supporting a probabilistic and autonomous scheduling architecture
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