Differential evolution for scheduling independent tasks on heterogeneous distributed environments

Abstract

Scheduling is one of the core steps to efficiently exploit the capabilities of heterogeneous distributed computing systems and is an NP-complete problem. Therefore using meta-heuristic algorithms is a suitable approach in order to cope with its difficulty. In this paper we apply an efficient meta-heuristic method, the differential evolution, to the independent tasks scheduling problem and compare its efficiency with other popular methods for minimizing makespan and flowtime in heterogeneous distributed computing systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.