Applying Economic Scheduling Methods to Grid Environments

Abstract

Scheduling becomes more difficult when resources are geographically distributed and owned by individuals with different access and cost policies. This chapter addresses the idea of applying economic models to Grid scheduling. We describe a scheduling infrastructure that implements a market-economy approach, and we evaluate the efficiency of this approach using simulations with real workload traces. Our evaluation shows that this economic scheduling algorithm provides average weighted response-times as good or better than a common scheduling algorithm with backfilling. Our economic model has the additional advantages of supporting different price models, different optimization objectives, varying access policies, and Quality of Service demands.