Efficient Batch Job Scheduling in Grids using Cellular Memetic Algorithms

Computational grids are an important emerging paradigm for large-scale distributed computing. As grid systems become more wide-spread, techniques for efficiently exploiting the large amount of grid computing resources become increasingly indispensable. A key aspect in order to benefit from these resources is the scheduling of jobs to grid resources. Due to the complex nature of grid systems, the design of efficient grid schedulers becomes challenging since such schedulers have to be able to optimize many conflicting criteria in very short periods of time. In this work we exploit the capabilities of cellular memetic algorithms (cMAs) for obtaining efficient batch schedulers for grid systems. A careful design of the cMA methods and operators for the problem yielded to an efficient and robust implementation. Our experimental study, based on a known static benchmark for the problem, shows that this heuristic approach is able to deliver very high quality planning of jobs to grid nodes and thus it can be used to design efficient dynamic schedulers for real grid systems. Such dynamic schedulers can be obtained by running the cMA-based scheduler in batch mode for a very short time to schedule jobs arriving to the system since the last activation of the cMA scheduler.