A web interface for meta-heuristics based grid schedulers

The use of meta-heuristics for designing efficient Grid schedulers is currently a common approach. One issue related to Grid based schedulers is their evaluation under different Grid configurations, such as dynamics of tasks and machines, task arrival, scheduling policies, etc. In this paper we present a web application that interfaces the final user with several meta-heuristics based Grid schedulers. The application interface facilities for each user the remote evaluation of the different heuristics, the configuration of the schedulers as well as the configuration of the Grid simulator under which the schedulers are run. The simulation results and traces are graphically represented and stored at the server and can retrieved in different formats such as spreadsheet form or pdf files. Historical executions are as well kept enabling a full study of use cases for different types of Grid schedulers. Thus, through this application the user can extract useful knowledge about the behavior of different schedulers by simulating realistic conditions of Grid system without needing to install and configure any specific software.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Meta-scheduling Issues in Interoperable HPCs, Grids and Clouds

Over the last years, interoperability among resources has been emerged as one of the most challenging research topics. However, the commonality of the complexity of the architectures (e.g., heterogeneity) and the targets that each computational paradigm including HPC, grids and clouds aims to achieve (e.g., flexibility) remain the same. This is to efficiently orchestrate resources in a distributed computing fashion by bridging the gap among local and remote participants. Initially, this is closely related with the scheduling concept which is one of the most important issues for designing a cooperative resource management system, especially in large scale settings such as in grids and clouds. Within this context, meta-scheduling offers additional functionalities in the area of interoperable resource management, this is because of its great agility to handle sudden variations and dynamic situations in user demands. Accordingly, the case of inter-infrastructures, including InterCloud, entitle that the decentralised meta-scheduling scheme overcome issues like consolidated administration management, bottleneck and local information exposition. In this work, we detail the fundamental issues for developing an effective interoperable meta-scheduler for e-infrastructures in general and InterCloud in particular. Finally, we describe a simulation and experimental configuration based on real grid workload traces to demonstrate the interoperable setting as well as provide experimental results as part of a strategic plan for integrating future meta-schedulers

Personal mobile grids with a honeybee inspired resource scheduler

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The overall aim of the thesis has been to introduce Personal Mobile Grids (PMGrids) as a novel paradigm in grid computing that scales grid infrastructures to mobile devices and extends grid entities to individual personal users. In this thesis, architectural designs as well as simulation models for PM-Grids are developed. The core of any grid system is its resource scheduler. However, virtually all current conventional grid schedulers do not address the non-clairvoyant scheduling problem, where job information is not available before the end of execution. Therefore, this thesis proposes a honeybee inspired resource scheduling heuristic for PM-Grids (HoPe) incorporating a radical approach to grid resource scheduling to tackle this problem. A detailed design and implementation of HoPe with a decentralised self-management and adaptive policy are initiated. Among the other main contributions are a comprehensive taxonomy of grid systems as well as a detailed analysis of the honeybee colony and its nectar acquisition process (NAP), from the resource scheduling perspective, which have not been presented in any previous work, to the best of our knowledge. PM-Grid designs and HoPe implementation were evaluated thoroughly through a strictly controlled empirical evaluation framework with a well-established heuristic in high throughput computing, the opportunistic scheduling heuristic (OSH), as a benchmark algorithm. Comparisons with optimal values and worst bounds are conducted to gain a clear insight into HoPe behaviour, in terms of stability, throughput, turnaround time and speedup, under different running conditions of number of jobs and grid scales. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of HoPe performance where it has successfully maintained optimum stability and throughput in more than 95% of the experiments, with HoPe achieving three times better than the OSH under extremely heavy loads. Regarding the turnaround time and speedup, HoPe has effectively achieved less than 50% of the turnaround time incurred by the OSH, while doubling its speedup in more than 60% of the experiments. These results indicate the potential of both PM-Grids and HoPe in realising futuristic grid visions. Therefore considering the deployment of PM-Grids in real life scenarios and the utilisation of HoPe in other parallel processing and high throughput computing systems are recommended

A study in grid simulation and scheduling

Grid computing is emerging as an essential tool for large scale analysis and problem solving in scientific and business domains. Whilst the idea of stealing unused processor cycles is as old as the Internet, we are still far from reaching a position where many distributed resources can be seamlessly utilised on demand. One major issue preventing this vision is deciding how to effectively manage the remote resources and how to schedule the tasks amongst these resources. This thesis describes an investigation into Grid computing, specifically the problem of Grid scheduling. This complex problem has many unique features making it particularly difficult to solve and as a result many current Grid systems employ simplistic, inefficient solutions. This work describes the development of a simulation tool, G-Sim, which can be used to test the effectiveness of potential Grid scheduling algorithms under realistic operating conditions. This tool is used to analyse the effectiveness of a simple, novel scheduling technique in numerous scenarios. The results are positive and show that it could be applied to current procedures to enhance performance and decrease the negative effect of resource failure. Finally a conversion between the Grid scheduling problem and the classic computing problem SAT is provided. Such a conversion allows for the possibility of applying sophisticated SAT solving procedures to Grid scheduling providing potentially effective solutions

QoS Provisioning by Meta-Scheduling in Advance within SLA-Based Grid Environments

The establishment of agreements between users and the entities which manage the Grid resources is still a challenging task. On the one hand, an entity in charge of dealing with the communication with the users is needed, with the aim of signing resource usage contracts and also implementing some renegotiation techniques, among others. On the other hand, some mechanisms should be implemented which decide if the QoS requested could be achieved and, in such case, ensuring that the QoS agreement is provided. One way of increasing the probability of achieving the agreed QoS is by performing meta-scheduling of jobs in advance, that is, jobs are scheduled some time before they are actually executed. In this way, it becomes more likely that the appropriate resources are available to run the jobs when needed. So, this paper presents a framework built on top of Globus and the GridWay meta-scheduler to provide QoS by means of performing meta-scheduling in advance. Thanks to this, QoS requirements of jobs are met (i.e. jobs are finished within a deadline). Apart from that, the mechanisms needed to manage the communication between the users and the system are presented and implemented through SLA contracts based on the WS-Agreement specification