Application-adaptive resource scheduling in a computational grid

Selecting appropriate resources for running a job efficiently is one of the common objectives in a computational grid. Resource scheduling should consider the specific characteristics of the application, and decide the metrics to be used accordingly. This paper presents a distributed resource scheduling framework mainly consisting of a job scheduler and a local scheduler. In order to meet the requirements of different applications, we adopt HGSA, a Heuristic-based Greedy Scheduling Algorithm, to schedule jobs in the grid, where the heuristic knowledge is the metric weights of the computing resources and the metric workload impact factors. The metric weight is used to control the effect of the metric on the application. For different applications, only metric weights and the metric workload impact factors need to be changed, while the scheduling algorithm remains the same. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the adaptability of the HGSA.