In a computational Grid environment, a common practice is to try to allocate an entire parallel job onto a single participating site. Sometimes a parallel job, upon its submission, cannot fit in any single site due to the occupation of some resources by running jobs. How the job scheduler handles such situations is an important issue which has the potential to further improve the utilization of Grid resources, as well as the performance of parallel jobs. This paper adopts moldable job allocation policies to deal with such situations in a heterogeneous computational Grid environment. The proposed policies are evaluated through a series of simulations using real workload traces. The moldable job allocation policies are also compared to the multi-site co-allocation policy, which is another approach usually used to deal with the resource fragmentation issue. The results indicate that the proposed moldable job allocation policies can further improve the system performance of a heterogeneous computational Grid significantly.
TopThis paper deals with scheduling and allocating independent parallel jobs in a heterogeneous computational Grid. Without Grid computing local users can only run jobs on the local site. The owners or administrators of different sites are interested in the consequences of participating in a computational Grid, whether such participation will result in better service for their local users by improving the job turnaround time. A common load-sharing practice is allocate an entire parallel job to a single site which is selected from all sites in the Grid based on some criteria. However, sometimes a parallel job, upon its submission, cannot fit in any single site due to the occupation of some resources by running jobs. How the job scheduler handles such situations is an important issue which has the potential to further improve the utilization of Grid resources as well as the performance of parallel jobs.
Job scheduling for parallel computers has been subject to research for a long time. As for Grid computing, previous works discussed several strategies for a Grid scheduler. One approach is the modification of traditional list scheduling strategies for usage on Grid (Carsten, Volker, Uwe, Ramin, & Achim, 2002; Carsten Ernemann, Hamscher, Streit, & Yahyapour, 2002a, 2002b; Hamscher, Schwiegelshohn, Streit, & Yahyapour, 2000). Some economic based methods are also being discussed (Buyya, Giddy, & Abramson, 2000; Carsten, Volker, & Ramin, 2002; Rajkumar Buyya, 2002; Yanmin et al., 2005). In this paper we explore non economic scheduling and allocation policies with support for a speed-heterogeneous Grid environment.