Article ID: | iaor20121311 |
Volume: | 63 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 350 |
End Page Number: | 364 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2012 |
Journal: | Computers and Mathematics with Applications |
Authors: | Xhafa Fatos, Koodziej Joanna |
Keywords: | combinatorial optimization, allocation: resources, computers: information, networks, heuristics: genetic algorithms |
Scheduling and resource allocation in large scale distributed environments, such as Computational Grids (CGs), arise new requirements and challenges not considered in traditional distributed computing environments. Among these new requirements, task abortion and security become needful criteria for Grid schedulers. The former arises due to the dynamics of the Grid systems, in which resources are expected to enter and leave the system in an unpredictable way. The latter requirement appears crucial in Grid systems mainly due to a multi‐domain nature of CGs. The main aim of this paper is to develop a scheduling model that enables the aggregation of task abortion and security requirements as additional, together with makespan and flowtime, scheduling criteria into a cumulative objective function. We demonstrate the high effectiveness of genetic‐based schedulers in finding near‐optimal solutions for multi‐objective scheduling problem, where all criteria (objectives) are simultaneously optimized. The proposed meta‐heuristics are experimentally evaluated in static and dynamic Grid scenarios by using a Grid simulator. The obtained results show the fast reduction of the values of basic scheduler performance metrics, especially in the dynamic case, that confirms the usefulness of the proposed approach in real‐life scenarios.