A novel approach to resource scheduling for parallel query processing on computational grids

Advances in network technologies and the emergence of Grid computing have both increased the need and provided the infrastructure for computation and data intensive applications to run over collections of heterogeneous and autonomous nodes. In the context of database query processing, existing parallelisation techniques cannot operate well in Grid environments because the way they select machines and allocate tasks compromises partitioned parallelism. The main contribution of this paper is the proposal of a low-complexity, practical resource selection and scheduling algorithm that enables queries to employ partitioned parallelism, in order to achieve better performance in a Grid setting. The evaluation results show that the scheduler proposed outperforms current techniques without sacrificing the efficiency of resource utilisation. Recommended by: Ioannis Vlahavas