High Performance Computing - HiPC 2008

Abstract

Emerging deadline-driven Grid applications require a number of computing resources to be available over a time frame, starting at a specific time in the future. To enable these applications, it is important to predict the resource availability and utilise this information during provisioning because it affects their performance. It is impractical to request the availability information upon the scheduling of every job due to communication overhead. However, existing work has not considered how the precision of availability information influences the provisioning. As a result, limitations exist in developing advanced resource provisioning and scheduling mechanisms. This work investigates how the precision of availability information affects resource provisioning in multiple site environments. Performance evaluation is conducted considering both multiple scheduling policies in resource providers and multiple provisioning policies in brokers, while varying the precision of availability information. Experimental results show that it is possible to avoid requesting availability information for every Grid job scheduled thus reducing the communication overhead. They also demonstrate that multiple resource partition policies improve the slowdown of Grid jobs.