Critical-task anticipation scheduling algorithm for heterogeneous and grid computing

Abstract

The problem of scheduling a weighted directed acyclic graph (DAG) to a set of heterogeneous processors to minimize the completion time has been recently studied, The NP-completeness of the problem has instigated researchers to propose different heuristic algorithms. In this paper, we present an efficient Critical-task Anticipation (CA) scheduling algorithm for heterogeneous computing systems. The CA scheduling algorithm introduces a new task prioritizing scheme that based on urgency and importance of tasks to obtain better schedule length compared to the Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time algorithm, To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we have developed a simulator that contains a parametric graph generator for generating weighted directed acyclic graphs with various characteristics. We have implemented the CA algorithm along with the HEFT scheduling algorithm on the simulator. The CA algorithm is shown to be effective in terms of speedup and easy to implement. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.