Performance evaluation of an autonomic network-aware metascheduler for Grids

Grid technologies have enabled the aggregation of geographically distributed resources in the context of a particular application. The network remains an important requirement for any Grid application, as entities involved in a Grid system (such as users, services, and data) need to communicate with each other over a network. The performance of the network must therefore be considered when carrying out tasks such as scheduling, migration or monitoring of jobs. Surprisingly, many existing quality of service efforts ignore the network and focus instead on processor workload and disk access time. Making use of the network in an efficient and fault-tolerant manner is challenging. In a previous contribution, we proposed an autonomic network-aware scheduling architecture that is capable of adapting its behavior to the current status of the environment. Now, we present a performance evaluation in which our proposal is compared with a conventional scheduling strategy. We present simulation results that show the benefits of our approach. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.