Decentralized dynamic scheduling across heterogeneous multi-core desktop grids

Abstract

The recent advent of multi-core computing environments increases both the heterogeneity and complexity of managing desktop grid resources, making efficient load balancing challenging even for a centralized manager. Even with good initial job assignments, dynamic scheduling is still needed to adapt to dynamic environments, as well as for applications whose running times are not known a priori. In this paper, we propose new decentralized scheduling schemes that backfill jobs locally and dynamically migrate waiting jobs across nodes to leverage residual resources, while guaranteeing bounded waiting times for all jobs. The methods attempt to maximize total throughput while balancing load across available grid resources. Experimental results via simulation show that our scheduling scheme has performance competitive with an online centralized scheduler.