Negotiation-Based Scheduling of Scientific Grid Workflows Through Advance Reservations

In its broadest sense, scheduling of Grid applications can be viewed as a negotiation process between a scheduling service optimising user-centric objectives such as execution time, and a resource manager optimising provider-centric metrics such as resource utilisation or fairness. In this paper we enhance an existing list scheduling algorithm designed for minimising the workflow makespan with advance reservation-based negotiation functionality. As an instantiation of the new negotiation phase, we investigate two advance reservation functionality from the resource provider perspective: attentive and progressive. We illustrate through real-world experiments a two-fold benefit of our approach: improved execution predictability from the user’s perspective, and higher resource utilisation fairness through a new progressive allocation strategy from the provider’s perspective.