SPHINX: A Fault-Tolerant System for Scheduling in Dynamic Grid Environments

A grid consists of high-end computational, storage, and network resources that, while known a priori, are dynamic with respect to activity and availability. Efficient scheduling of requests to use grid resources must adapt to this dynamic environment while meeting administrative policies. In this paper, we describe a framework called SPHINX that can administrate grid policies, and schedule complex and data intensive scientific applications. We present experimental results for several scheduling strategies that effectively utilize the monitoring and job-tracking information provided by SPHINX. These results demonstrate that SPHINX can effectively schedule work across a large number of distributed clusters that are owned by multiple units in a virtual organization in a fault-tolerant way in spite of the highly dynamic nature of the grid and complex policy issues. The novelty lies in use of effective monitoring of resources and job execution tracking in making scheduling decisions and fault-tolerance - something that is missed in today’s grid environments.