Abstract: | Computational Grids and peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networks enable the sharing, selection, and aggregation of geographically distributed resources for solving large‐scale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. The management and composition of resources and services for scheduling applications, however, becomes a complex undertaking. We have proposed a computational economy framework for regulating the supply of and demand for resources and allocating them for applications based on the users' quality‐of‐service requirements. The framework requires economy‐driven deadline‐ and budget‐constrained (DBC) scheduling algorithms for allocating resources to application jobs in such a way that the users' requirements are met. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling algorithm, called the DBC cost–time optimization scheduling algorithm, that aims not only to optimize cost, but also time when possible. The performance of the cost–time optimization scheduling algorithm has been evaluated through extensive simulation and empirical studies for deploying parameter sweep applications on global Grids. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |