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.
In the last decades, after Kwok and Ahmad's work, other surveys and taxonomies for solutions to the scheduling problem for parallel systems have been developed. Most of these works focus on heterogeneous distributed systems @cite_159 , which Ahmad and Kwok considered as one of the most challenging directions to follow @cite_141 . Job scheduling strategies for grid computing are evaluated by in @cite_168 . The authors present common scheduling structures, such as centralized, decentralized, and hierarchical. Within each scheduling structure, they present and evaluate @math processor selection strategies and three scheduling algorithms, namely (FCFS), , and . After this work, many dynamic scheduling strategies were developed to tackle with the grid dynamicity.
@cite_141 @cite_168 @cite_159
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In this paper, we discuss typical scheduling structures that occur in computational grids. Scheduling algorithms and selection strategies applicable to these structures are introduced and classified. Simulations were used to evaluate these aspects considering combinations of different Job and Machine Models. Some of the results are presented in this paper and are discussed in qualitative and quantitative way. For hierarchical scheduling, a common scheduling structure, the simulation results confirmed the benefit of Backfill. Unexpected results were achieved as FCFS proves to perform better than Backfill when using a central job-pool. The problem of optimally scheduling tasks onto heterogeneous resources in grids, minimizing the makespan of these tasks, has proved to be NP-complete. There is no best scheduling algorithm for all grid computing systems. An alternative is to select an appropriate scheduling algorithm to use in a given grid environment because of the characteristics of the tasks, machines and network connectivity. In this paper a survey is presented on the problem and the different aspects of job scheduling in grids such as (a) fault-tolerance; (b) security; and (c) simulation of grid job scheduling strategies are discussed. This paper also presents a discussion on the future research topics and the challenges of job scheduling in grids. In grid environments applications require dynamic scheduling for optimized assignment of tasks on available resources, so the optimization represents a key solution for scheduling. This paper presents an evaluation of multi-objective decentralized scheduling models for the problem of task allocation. It also presents a survey of existing optimization solutions for grid scheduling. The surveyed scheduling solutions are: random and best of n random, exhaustive search, simulated annealing, game theory, ad-hoc greedy scheduler, and genetic algorithm for decentralized scheduling. We carry out our experiments with various scheduling scenarios and with heterogeneous input tasks and computation resources. We also present the methods to evaluate and validate the described scheduling methods. We present several experimental results that offer a support for near-optimal algorithm selection.