Personal tools
You are here: Home Publications Grid-Centric Scheduling Strategies for Workflow Applications
Document Actions

Yang Zhang (2009)

Grid-Centric Scheduling Strategies for Workflow Applications

Ph.D. Thesis, Rice University, Houston, TX.

Grid computing faces a great challenge because the resources are not localized, but distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic. Thus, it is essential to provide a set of programming tools that execute an application on the Grid resources with as little input from the user as possible. The thesis of this work is that Grid-centric scheduling techniques of workflow applications can provide good usability of the Grid environment by reliably executing the application on a large scale distributed system with good performance. We support our thesis with new and e ective approaches in the following five aspects.

First, we modeled the performance of the existing scheduling approaches in a multi-cluster Grid environment. We implemented several widely-used scheduling algorithms and identi fied the best candidate. The study further introduced a new measurement, based on our experiments, which can improve the schedule quality of some scheduling algorithms as much as 20 fold in a multi-cluster Grid environment.

Second, we studied the scalability of the existing Grid scheduling algorithms. To deal with Grid systems consisting of hundreds of thousands of resources, we designed and implemented a novel approach that performs explicit resource selection decoupled from scheduling. Our experimental evaluation confi rmed that our decoupled approach can be scalable in such an environment without sacri cing the quality of the schedule by more than 10%.

Third, we proposed solutions to address the dynamic nature of Grid computing with a new cluster-based hybrid scheduling mechanism. Our experimental results collected from real executions on production clusters demonstrated that this approach produces programs running 30% to 100% faster than the other scheduling approaches we implemented on both reserved and shared resources.

Fourth, we improved the reliability of Grid computing by incorporating fault tolerance and recovery mechanisms into the workow application execution. Our experiments on a simulated multi-cluster Grid environment demonstrated the eff ectiveness of our approach and also characterized the three-way trade-o ff between reliability, performance and resource usage when executing a workflow application.

Finally, we improved the large batch-queue wait time often found in production Grid clusters. We developed a novel approach to partition the workflow application and submit them judiciously to achieve less total batch-queue wait time. The experimental results derived from production site batch queue logs show that our approach can reduce total wait time by as much as 70%.

Our approaches combined can greatly improve the usability of Grid computing while increasing the performance of workow applications on a multi-cluster Grid environment.
by Charles Koelbel last modified 2009-09-29 10:39
« October 2010 »
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31
 

VGrADS Collaborators include:

Rice University UCSD UH UCSB UTK ISI UTK

Powered by Plone