Applying double auctions for scheduling of workflows on the Grid

Grid economy models have long been considered as a promising alternative for the classical Grid resource management, due to their dynamic and decentralized nature, and because the financial valuation of resources and services is inherent in any such model. In particular, auction models are widely used in the existing Grid research, as they are easy to implement and are shown to successfully manage resource allocation on the Grid market. The focus on the current work is on workflow scheduling in the Grid resource allocation model based on Continuous Double Auctions (CDA). We analyze different scheduling strategies that can be applied by the user to execute workflows in such an environment, and try to identify the general behavioral patterns that can lead to a fast and cheap workflow execution. In the experimental study, we show that under certain circumstances some benefit can be gained by applying an ldquoaggressiverdquo scheduling strategy.