Abstract Scheduling is essentially a decision-making process that enables resource sharing among a number of activities by determining their execution order on the set of available resources. The emergence of distributed systems brought new challenges on scheduling in computer systems, including clusters, grids, and more recently clouds. On the other hand, the plethora of research makes it hard for both newcomers researchers to understand the relationship among different scheduling problems and strategies proposed in the literature, which hampers the identification of new and relevant research avenues. In this paper we introduce a classification of the scheduling problem in distributed systems by presenting a taxonomy that incorporates recent developments, especially those in cloud computing. We review the scheduling literature to corroborate the taxonomy and analyze the interest in different branches of the proposed taxonomy. Finally, we identify relevant future directions in scheduling for distributed systems.
As claim in their scheduling review @cite_11 , parallel job scheduling reviews are needed in a regular basis. The purpose of their short review was to introduce clusters and grids into the parallel job scheduling literature. Indeed, the authors present an introduction to job scheduling in grids, highlighting differences between a parallel computer and the grid. They point out cross-domain load balancing and co-allocations as two main concerns when scheduling in grids. In our work, we introduce a classification of schedulers in distributed systems that comprises a more extensive view of grid computing algorithms. Moreover, we highlight new requirements for the cloud computing emergent paradigm as well as its differences to grid computing.
@cite_11
2008170189
Parallel computing on volatile distributed resources requires schedulers that consider job and resource characteristics. We study unconventional computing environments containing devices spread throughout a single large organization. The devices are not necessarily typical general purpose machines; instead, they could be processors dedicated to special purpose tasks (for example printing and document processing), but capable of being leveraged for distributed computations. Harvesting their idle cycles can simultaneously help resources cooperate to perform their primary task and enable additional functionality and services. A new burstiness metric characterizes the volatility of the high-priority native tasks. A burstiness-aware scheduling heuristic opportunistically introduces grid jobs (a lower priority workload class) to avoid the higher-priority native applications, and effectively harvests idle cycles. Simulations based on real workload traces indicate that this approach improves makespan by an average of 18.3 over random scheduling, and comes within 7.6 of the theoretical upper bound.