Clusters of computers have emerged as mainstream parallel and distributed
platforms for high-performance, high-throughput and high-availability
computing. To enable effective resource management on clusters, numerous
cluster managements systems and schedulers have been designed. However, their
focus has essentially been on maximizing CPU performance, but not on improving
the value of utility delivered to the user and quality of services. This paper
presents a new computational economy driven scheduling system called Libra,
which has been designed to support allocation of resources based on the users?
quality of service (QoS) requirements. It is intended to work as an add-on to
the existing queuing and resource management system. The first version has been
implemented as a plugin scheduler to the PBS (Portable Batch System) system.
The scheduler offers market-based economy driven service for managing batch
jobs on clusters by scheduling CPU time according to user utility as determined
by their budget and deadline rather than system performance considerations. The
Libra scheduler ensures that both these constraints are met within an O(n)
run-time. The Libra scheduler has been simulated using the GridSim toolkit to
carry out a detailed performance analysis. Results show that the deadline and
budget based proportional resource allocation strategy improves the utility of
the system and user satisfaction as compared to system-centric scheduling
strategies.Comment: 13 page