Improving scheduling decisions by using knowledge about parallel applications resource usage

Abstract

This paper presents a process scheduling algorithm that uses information about the capacity of the processing elements over the communication network and parallel applications in order to allocate resources on heterogeneous and distributed environments. The information about the applications is composed by the resources usage behavior (percentage values related to CPU's utilization, network send and network receive) and by the prediction of the execution time of tasks that make up a parallel distribution. The knowledge about the resources usage is obtained by means of the Art2A self-organizing artificial neural network and by a specific labeling algorithm; the knowledge about the execution time is obtained through the learning techniques based on instances. The knowledge about the application execution features, combined with the information about the computing capacity of the resources available in the environment, are used as an entry to improve the decisions of the proposed scheduling algorithm. Such algorithm uses genetic algorithm techniques to find out the most appropriate computing resources subset to support the applications. The proposed algorithm is evaluated through simulation by using a model parameterized with the features obtained from a real distributed scenario. The results obtained by the evaluation show that the scheduling that uses the genetic search allows a better allocation of computing resources on environments composed of tens of computers on which the parallel applications are composed by tens of tasks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.