New Grid Task Scheduling: Selective Algorithm based-on Min-Min and Max-Min Heuristics

Today, the high cost of supercomputers in the one hand and the need for large-scale computational resources on the other hand, has led to use network of computational resources known as Grid. Numerous research groups in universities, research labs, and industries around the world are now working on a type of Grid called Computational Grids that enable aggregation of distributed resources for solving large-scale data intensive problems in science, engineering, and commerce To better use tremendous capabilities of this distributed system, effective and efficient scheduling algorithms are needed. In this paper, we introduce a new scheduling algorithm based on two conventional scheduling algorithms, Min-Min and Max-Min, to use their cons and at the same time, cover their pros. It selects between the two algorithms based on standard deviation of the expected completion time of tasks on resources. We evaluate our scheduling heuristic, the Selective algorithm, within a grid simulator called GridSim and compared our approach to its two basic heuristics. The experimental results show that the new heuristic can lead to significant performance gain for a variety of scenarios.

Keywords:

task scheduling , grid computing , Min- Min , Max-Min.