Looking-Ahead Algorithms for Single Machine Schedulers to Support Advance Reservation of Grid Jobs

Advance reservations are usually adopted to guarantee the QoS of grid applications by reserving a particular resource capability over a defined time interval on local resources. Single machine scheduling is the basis of more complicated parallel machine scheduling. Assume the information (e.g., arrival time, required processing time) on queued AR and non-AR jobs is known before scheduling, it is NP-hard to allocate non-resumable non-AR jobs into available intervals left by AR jobs to minimize the makespan. This paper investigates the cases with lookahead k in which the scheduler can preview the durations of the sequent k-1 available intervals as the current available interval arrives. By transforming this deterministic scheduling problem into a variant of the standard variable-sized bin packing problem, this paper proposed four looking-ahead algorithms and investigated their performances from both of the worst case and the average case viewpoints.