QoS and preemption aware scheduling in federated and virtualized Grid computing environments

Resource provisioning is one of the challenges in federated Grid environments. In these environments each Grid serves requests from external users along with local users. Recently, this resource provisioning is performed in the form of Virtual Machines (VMs). The problem arises when there are insufficient resources for local users to be served. The problem gets complicated further when external requests have different QoS requirements. Serving local users could be solved by preempting VMs from external users which impose overheads on the system. Therefore, the question is how the number of VM preemptions in a Grid can be minimized. Additionally, how we can decrease the likelihood of preemption for requests with more QoS requirements. We propose a scheduling policy in InterGrid, as a federated Grid, which reduces the number of VM preemptions and dispatches external requests in a way that fewer requests with QoS constraints get affected by preemption. Extensive simulation results indicate that the number of VM preemptions is decreased at least by 60%, particularly, for requests with more QoS requirements.     

Pro-active failure handling mechanisms for scheduling in grid computing environments

In this paper, we consider designing pro-active failure handling strategies for grid environments. These strategies estimate the availability of resources in the Grid, and also preemptively calculate the expected long term capacity of the Grid. Using these strategies, we create modified versions of the backfill and replication algorithms to include all three pro-active strategies to ascertain each of their effectiveness in the prevention of job failures during execution. Also, we extend our earlier work on a co-ordinate based allocation strategy. The extended algorithm also shows continual improvement when operating under the same execution environment. In our experiments, we compare these enhanced algorithms to their original forms, and show that pro-active failure handling is able to, in some cases, avoid all job failures during execution. Also, we show that NSA provides the best balance of enhanced throughput and job failures during execution of the algorithms we have considered.     

An optimization approach for decentralized QoS‐based scheduling based on utility and pricing in Grid computing

This paper presents an optimization approach for decentralized Quality of Service (QoS)‐based scheduling based on utility and pricing in Grid computing. The paper assumes that the quality dimensions can be easily formulated as utility functions to express quality preferences for each task agent. The utility values are calculated by the user‐supplied utility function that can be formulated with the task parameters. The QoS constraint Grid resource scheduling problem is formulated into a utility optimization problem. The QoS‐based Grid resource scheduling optimization is decomposed into two subproblems by applying the Lagrangian method. In the Grid, a Grid task agent acts as a consumer paying for the Grid resource and the resource providers receive profits from task agents. A pricing‐based QoS scheduling algorithm is used to perform optimally decentralized QoS‐based resource scheduling. The experiments investigate the effect of the QoS metrics on the global utility and compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with other economical Grid resource scheduling algorithms. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimizing grid computing configuration and scheduling for geospatial analysis: An example with interpolating DEM

Many geographic analyses are very time-consuming and do not scale well when large datasets are involved. For example, the interpolation of DEMs (digital evaluation model) for large geographic areas could become a problem in practical application, especially for web applications such as terrain visualization, where a fast response is required and computational demands exceed the capacity of a traditional single processing unit conducting serial processing. Therefore, high performance and parallel computing approaches, such as grid computing, were investigated to speed up the geographic analysis algorithms, such as DEM interpolation. The key for grid computing is to configure an optimized grid computing platform for the geospatial analysis and optimally schedule the geospatial tasks within a grid platform. However, there is no research focused on this. Using DEM interoperation as an example, we report our systematic research on configuring and scheduling a high performance grid computing platform to improve the performance of geographic analyses through a systematic study on how the number of cores, processors, grid nodes, different network connections and concurrent request impact the speedup of geospatial analyses. Condor, a grid middleware, is used to schedule the DEM interpolation tasks for different grid configurations. A Kansas raster-based DEM is used for a case study and an inverse distance weighting (IDW) algorithm is used in interpolation experiments.