On the performance-driven load distribution for heterogeneous computational grids

Load balancing has been a key concern for traditional multiprocessor systems. The emergence of computational grids extends this challenge to deal with more serious problems, such as scalability, heterogeneity of computing resources and considerable transfer delay. In this paper, we present a dynamic and decentralized load balancing algorithm for computationally intensive jobs on a heterogeneous distributed computing platform. The time spent by a job in the system is considered as the main issue that needs to be minimized. Our main contributions are: (1) Our algorithm uses site desirability for processing power and transfer delay to guide load assignment and redistribution, (2) Our transfer and location policies are a combination of two specific strategies that are performance driven to minimize execution cost. These two policies are the Instantaneous Distribution Policy (IDP) and the Load Adjustment Policy (LAP), (3) The communication overhead involved in information collection is reduced using mutual information feedback. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms conventional approaches over a wide range of system parameters.     

Optimal replica placement in hierarchical Data Grids with locality assurance

In this paper, we address three issues concerning data replica placement in hierarchical Data Grids that can be presented as tree structures. The first is how to ensure load balance among replicas. To achieve this, we propose a placement algorithm that finds the optimal locations for replicas so that their workload is balanced. The second issue is how to minimize the number of replicas. To solve this problem, we propose an algorithm that determines the minimum number of replicas required when the maximum workload capacity of each replica server is known. Finally, we address the issue of service quality by proposing a new model in which each request must be given a quality-of-service guarantee. We describe new algorithms that ensure both workload balance and quality of service simultaneously.     

Scheduling Task Parallel Applications for Rapid Turnaround on Enterprise Desktop Grids

Desktop Grids are popular platforms for high throughput applications, but due to their inherent resource volatility it is difficult to exploit them for applications that require rapid turnaround. Efficient desktop Grid execution of short-lived applications is an attractive proposition and we claim that it is achievable via intelligent resource selection. We propose three general techniques for resource selection: resource prioritization, resource exclusion, and task duplication. We use these techniques to instantiate several scheduling heuristics. We evaluate these heuristics through trace-driven simulations of four representative desktop Grid configurations. We find that ranking desktop resources according to their clock rates, without taking into account their availability history, is surprisingly effective in practice. Our main result is that a heuristic that uses the appropriate combination of resource prioritization, resource exclusion, and task replication can achieve performance within a factor of 1.7 of optimal in practice.     

Adaptive pre-task assignment scheduling strategy for heterogeneous distributed raytracing system

One of the main obstacles in obtaining high performance from heterogeneous distributed computing (HDC) system is the inevitable communication overhead. This occurs when tasks executing on different computing nodes exchange data or the assigned sub-task size is very small. In this paper, we present adaptive pre-task assignment (APA) strategy for heterogeneous distributed raytracing system. In this strategy, the master assigns pre-task to the each node. The size of sub-task for each node is proportional to the node’s performance. One of the main features of this strategy is that it reduces the inter-processes communication, the cost overhead of the node’s idle time and load imbalance, which normally occurs in traditional runtime task scheduling (RTS) strategies. Performances of the RTS and APA strategies are evaluated on manager/master and workers model of HDC system. The experimental results of our proposed (APA) strategy have shown a significant improvement in the performance over RTS strategy.     

Non-preemptive scheduling to maximize the minimum global inter-completion time

Temporal load-balancing—“spreading out” the executions of tasks over time—is desirable in many applications. A form of temporal load-balancing is discussed, scheduling to maximize minimum minimum global inter-completion time (MGICT-scheduling). It is shown that MGICT-scheduling is, in general, NP-hard. A number of restricted classes of task systems are identified, which can be efficiently MGICT-scheduled. The technique is applied to a Defense Network System. Simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy achieves higher communication performance in multiprocessor systems. Specifically, our strategy significantly reduces average message delay and percentage of delayed messages.     

Utopia: A load sharing facility for large,heterogeneous distributed computer systems

Load sharing in large, heterogeneous distributed systems allows users to access vast amounts of computing resources scattered around the system and may provide substantial performance improvements to applications. We discuss the design and implementation issues in Utopia, a load sharing facility specifically built for large and heterogeneous systems. The system has no restriction on the types of tasks that can be remotely executed, involves few application changes and no operating system change, supports a high degree of transparency for remote task execution, and incurs low overhead. The algorithms for managing resource load information and task placement take advantage of the clustering nature of large-scale distributed systems; centralized algorithms are used within host clusters, and directed graph algorithms are used among the clusters to make Utopia scalable to thousands of hosts. Task placements in Utopia exploit the heterogeneous hosts and consider varying resource demands of the tasks. A range of mechanisms for remote execution is available in Utopia that provides varying degrees of transparency and efficiency. A number of applications have been developed for Utopia, ranging from a load sharing command interpreter, to parallel and distributed applications, to a distributed batch facility. For example, an enhanced Unix command interpreter allows arbitrary commands and user jobs to be executed remotely, and a parallel make facility achieves speed-ups of 15 or more by processing a collection of tasks in parallel on a number of hosts.     

Optimal state-free, size-aware dispatching for heterogeneous -type systems

We consider a cluster of heterogeneous servers, modeled as M/G/1 first-come first-serve queues with different processing speeds. A dispatcher that assigns jobs to the servers takes as input only the size of the arriving job and the overall job-size distribution. This general model captures the behavior of a variety of real systems, such as web server clusters. Our goal is to identify assignment strategies that the dispatcher can perform to minimize expected completion time and waiting time. We show that there exist optimal strategies that are deterministic, fixing the server to which jobs of particular sizes are always sent. We prove that the optimal strategy for systems with identical servers assigns a non-overlapping interval range of job sizes to each server. We then prove that when server processing speeds differ, it is necessary to assign each server a distinct set of intervals of job sizes in order to minimize expected waiting or response times.     

Leveraging workload diversity through OS scheduling to maximize performance on single-ISA heterogeneous multicore systems

Recent research has highlighted the potential benefits of single-ISA heterogeneous multicore processors over cost-equivalent homogeneous ones, and it is likely that future processors will integrate cores that have the same instruction set architecture (ISA) but offer different performance and power characteristics. To fully tap into the potential of these processors, the operating system must be aware of the hardware asymmetry when making scheduling decisions and map applications to cores in consideration of their performance characteristics. We propose a Heterogeneity-Aware Signature-Supported (HASS) scheduling algorithm that performs this mapping using per-thread architectural signatures, which are compact summaries of threads’ architectural properties. We implemented HASS in OpenSolaris, and demonstrated that it always outperforms a heterogeneity-agnostic scheduler (by as much as 12.5%) for workloads exhibiting sufficient diversity. Our evaluation also includes an extensive comparison with other heterogeneity-aware schedulers to provide a more clear understanding of the pros and cons behind HASS.     

Task scheduling algorithm using minimized duplications in homogeneous systems

For fine grain task graphs, duplication-based scheduling algorithms are generally more efficient than list and cluster-based algorithms. However, most duplication-based heuristics try to duplicate all possible ancestor nodes of a given join node, in order to reduce the earliest start time (EST) of the join node, even though these ancestor nodes have already been allocated in previous steps. Thus, these duplication heuristics inevitably induce redundant duplications, which lead to the superfluous consumption of resources and generally deteriorate the scheduling result in the case of a bounded number of processors. When scheduling algorithms are used on an unbounded number of processors, the required number of processors grows excessively with the size of the task graph, thereby limiting the practicality of these algorithms for large task graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm designed to allocate join nodes without redundant duplications. In the proposed algorithm, if the ancestor nodes of a join node are duplicated when scheduling the join node, the original allocations of these ancestor nodes are removed using a very efficient method. The performance of the proposed algorithm, in terms of its normalized schedule length and efficiency, is compared with that of some of the recently proposed algorithms. The proposed algorithm generates better or comparable schedules with minimized duplication. Specifically, the simulation results show that it is most useful on a bounded number of processors.     

Join-Idle-Queue: A novel load balancing algorithm for dynamically scalable web services

The prevalence of dynamic-content web services, exemplified by search and online social networking, has motivated an increasingly wide web-facing front end. Horizontal scaling in the Cloud is favored for its elasticity, and distributed design of load balancers is highly desirable. Existing algorithms with a centralized design, such as Join-the-Shortest-Queue (JSQ), incur high communication overhead for distributed dispatchers.We propose a novel class of algorithms called Join-Idle-Queue (JIQ) for distributed load balancing in large systems. Unlike algorithms such as Power-of-Two, the JIQ algorithm incurs no communication overhead between the dispatchers and processors at job arrivals. We analyze the JIQ algorithm in the large system limit and find that it effectively results in a reduced system load, which produces 30-fold reduction in queueing overhead compared to Power-of-Two at medium to high load. An extension of the basic JIQ algorithm deals with very high loads using only local information of server load.     

Scheduling algorithms for heterogeneous batch processors with incompatible job-families

We consider the problem of scheduling heterogeneous batch processors (i.e., batch processors with different capacity) with incompatible job-families and non-identical job sizes to maximize the utilization of the batch processors. We analyzed the computational complexity of this problem and showed that it is NP-hard and proposed eight variants of a fast greedy heuristic. A series of computational experiments were carried out to compare the performance of the heuristics and showed that the heuristics are capable of consistently obtaining near (estimated) optimal solutions with very low-computational burden for large-scale problems. We also carried out a study to find the effect of family processing time changes on the performance of the heuristics. This sensitivity analysis indicated that the processing time set of job-families influences the performance of the heuristic algorithms.     

一种新的结构化对等网负载均衡算法

研究结构化对等网(P2P)中的负载均衡问题,P2P网络的节点、延迟和处理能力差异性很大,当前负载均衡算法忽略节点差异性,造成网络负载极不平衡,容易出现"热点"问题,使负载变化大。为了更好的均衡P2P负载,提出一种新的网络负载均衡算法。算法充分考虑节点之间的差异性,对物理节点的地址空间进行动态分配,对于热点资源下载采用局部搜索算法找到邻居节点,并自动把负载转移到轻载节点上,保证节点间负载均衡。仿真结果表明,新网络负载均衡算法加快了负载均衡速度,使P2P网络负载均衡更加均衡,能够很好保持系统稳定性。     

List scheduling with duplication for heterogeneous computing systems

Effective task scheduling is essential for obtaining high performance in heterogeneous computing systems (HCS). However, finding an effective task schedule in HCS, requires the consideration of the heterogeneity of computation and communication. To solve this problem, we present a list scheduling algorithm, called Heterogeneous Earliest Finish with Duplicator (HEFD). As task priority is a key attribute for list scheduling algorithm, this paper presents a new approach for computing their priority which considers the performance difference in target HCS using variance. Another novel idea proposed in this paper is to try to duplicate all parent tasks and get an optimal scheduling solution. The comparison study, based on both randomly generated graphs and the graphs of some real applications, shows that our scheduling algorithm HEFD significantly surpasses other three well-known algorithms.     

An efficient weighted bi-objective scheduling algorithm for heterogeneous systems

This paper proposes the Makespan and Reliability Cost Driven (MRCD) heuristic, a static scheduling strategy for heterogeneous distributed systems that not only minimizes the makespan, but also maximizes the reliability of the application. The MRCD scheduling decisions are guided by a weighted function that considers both objectives simultaneously, instead of prioritizing one of them. This work also introduces a classification of the solutions produced by weighted bi-objective schedulers to aid users to tune the weighting function such that an appropriate solution can be selected in accordance with their needs. In comparison with the related work, MRCD produced schedules with makespans that were significantly better then those produced by the other strategies at expense of an insignificant deterioration in reliability.     

一个面向分布式桌面计算环境的超瘦客户端

瘦客户端技术通过程序逻辑与用户界面的分离以及处理的集中来达到提高资源利用率、降低系统成本、提高系统安全性等目的。该文介绍了一个适合面向分布式桌面计算环境的超瘦客户端系统——SmartTerm,分析了SmartTerm设计中面临的一些技术问题,提出了解决方案,并且以RFB协议为基础提供了一个SmartTerm的设计实现实例。SmartTerm可以应用到网格计算和普适计算环境下的网格终端、移动设备、远程控制设备等诸多领域。     

Reliability-aware scheduling strategy for heterogeneous distributed computing systems

Heterogeneous computing systems are promising computing platforms, since single parallel architecture based systems may not be sufficient to exploit the available parallelism with the running applications. In some cases, heterogeneous distributed computing (HDC) systems can achieve higher performance with lower cost than single-machine supersystems. However, in HDC systems, processors and networks are not failure free and any kind of failure may be critical to the running applications. One way of dealing with such failures is to employ a reliable scheduling algorithm. Unfortunately, most existing scheduling algorithms for precedence constrained tasks in HDC systems do not adequately consider reliability requirements of inter-dependent tasks. In this paper, we design a reliability-driven scheduling architecture that can effectively measure system reliability, based on an optimal reliability communication path search algorithm, and then we introduce reliability priority rank (RRank) to estimate the task’s priority by considering reliability overheads. Furthermore, based on directed acyclic graph (DAG) we propose a reliability-aware scheduling algorithm for precedence constrained tasks, which can achieve high quality of reliability for applications. The comparison studies, based on both randomly generated graphs and the graphs of some real applications, show that our scheduling algorithm outperforms the existing scheduling algorithms in terms of makespan, scheduling length ratio, and reliability. At the same time, the improvement gained by our algorithm increases as the data communication among tasks increases.     

Hash-based proximity clustering for efficient load balancing in heterogeneous DHT networks

Distributed hash table (DHT) networks based on consistent hashing functions have an inherent load uneven distribution problem. The objective of DHT load balancing is to balance the workload of the network nodes in proportion to their capacity so as to eliminate traffic bottleneck. It is challenging because of the dynamism, proximity and heterogeneity natures of DHT networks and time-varying load characteristics.     

异构结构化P2P网络负载均衡方案

结构化P2P网络由于采用DHT算法导致节点存储资源的不均衡,当前解决方案都是假定节点容量及负载是均匀分布在系统中,而忽略了实际网络存在的节点异构性的影响.本文提出的考虑节点异构性的结构化P2P网络负载均衡方案提出了负载均衡的衡量标准--负载平滑度,采用基于相同资源描述符的资源整体转移方案,以节点的邻居节点为平衡范围,描述了系统在节点加入、离开,资源加入以及节点过载情况下的算法,使得整个系统逐步达到负载均衡.该方案充分考虑了实际网络中存在的异构问题.仿真实验表明,该方案有效地解决了并构P2P网络下的负载均衡问题.     

Heuristics for scheduling file-sharing tasks on heterogeneous systems with distributed repositories

We consider the problem of scheduling an application on a computing system consisting of heterogeneous processors and data repositories. The application consists of a large number of file-sharing otherwise independent tasks. The files initially reside on the repositories. The processors and the repositories are connected through a heterogeneous interconnection network. Our aim is to assign the tasks to the processors, to schedule the file transfers from the repositories, and to schedule the executions of tasks on each processor in such a way that the turnaround time is minimized. We propose a heuristic composed of three phases: initial task assignment, task assignment refinement, and execution ordering. We experimentally compare the proposed heuristics with three well-known heuristics on a large number of problem instances. The proposed heuristic runs considerably faster than the existing heuristics and obtains 10–14% better turnaround times than the best of the three existing heuristics.     

Dynamic scheduling techniques for heterogeneous computing systems

There has been a recent increase of interest in heterogeneous computing systems, due partly to the fact that a single parallel architecture may not be adequate for exploiting all of a program's available parallelism. In some cases, heterogeneous systems have been shown to produce higher performance for lower cost than a single large machine. However, there has been only limited work on developing techniques and frameworks for partitioning and scheduling applications across the components of a heterogeneous system. In this paper we propose a general model for describing and evaluating heterogeneous systems that considers the degree of uniformity in the processing elements and the communication channels as a measure of the heterogeneity in the system. We also propose a class of dynamic scheduling algorithms for a heterogeneous computing system interconnected with an arbitrary communication network. These algorithms execute a novel optimization technique to dynamically compute schedules based on the potentially non-uniform computation and communication costs on the processors of a heterogeneous system. A unique aspect of these algorithms is that they easily adapt to different task granularities, to dynamically varying processor and system loads, and to systems with varying degrees of heterogeneity. Our simulations are designed to facilitate the evaluation of different scheduling algorithms under varying degrees of heterogeneity. The results show improved performance for our algorithms compared to the performance resulting from existing scheduling techniques.