QoS-Based Job Scheduling and Resource Management Strategies for Grid Computing

1. Introduction

This article elaborates the quality of service (QoS) aspect of load sharing activities in a computational grid environment. Load sharing is achieved through appropriate job scheduling and resource allocation mechanisms. A computational grid usually consists of several geographically distant sites each with different amount of computing resources. Different types of grids might have different QoS requirements. In most academic or experimental grids the computing sites volunteer to join the grids and can freely decide to quit the grids at any time when they feel joining the grids bring them no benefits. Therefore, maintaining an appropriate QoS level becomes an important incentive to attract computing sites to join a grid and stay in it. This article explores the QoS issues in such type of academic and experimental grids. We first define QoS based performance metrics for evaluating job scheduling and resource allocation strategies. According to the QoS performance metrics appropriate grid-level load sharing strategies are developed. The developed strategies address both user-level and site-level QoS concerns. A series of simulation experiments were performed to evaluate the proposed strategies based on real and synthetic workloads.