Adaptive Scheduling for Task Farming with Grid Middleware

Scheduling in metacomputing environments is an active field of research as the vision of a Computational Grid becomes more concrete. An important class of Grid applications are long-running parallel computations with large numbers of somewhat independent tasks (Monte Carlo simulations, parameter-space searches, etc.). A number of Grid middleware projects are available to implement such applications, but scheduling strategies are still open research issues. This is mainly due to the diversity of both Grid resource types and their availability patterns. The purpose of this work is to develop and validate a general adaptive scheduling algorithm for task farming applications along with a user interface that makes the algorithm accessible to domain scientists. The authors’ algorithm is general in that it is not tailored to a particular Grid middleware and it requires very few assumptions concerning the nature of the resources. Their first testbed is NetSolve as it allows quick and easy development of the algorithm by isolating the developer from issues such as process control, I/O, remote software access, or fault-tolerance.