A system-centric scheduling policy for optimizing objectives of application and resource in grid computing

In grid computing, grid users who submit applications and resources providers who provide resources have different motivations when they join the grid. Application-centric scheduling aims to optimize the performance of individual application. Resource-centric scheduling aims to optimize the resource utilization of resources provider. Due to autonomy both in grid users and resource providers, the objectives of application-centric and resource-centric scheduling often conflict. The paper proposes a system-centric scheduling that provides a solution of joint optimization of the objectives for both the grid resource and grid application. Utility functions are used to express the objectives of grid resource and application. The system-centric scheduling policy can be formulated as joint optimization of utilities of grid applications and grid resources, which combine both application centric and resource-centric scheduling benefits. Simulations are conducted to study the performance of the system-centric scheduling algorithm. The experiment results show that the system-centric scheduling algorithm yields significantly better performance than application-centric scheduling algorithm and resource-centric scheduling algorithm.