Comparison of multi-criteria scheduling techniques

This paper proposes a novel schedule-based approach for scheduling a continuous stream of batch jobs on the machines of a computational Grid. Our new solutions represented by dispatching rule Earliest Gap-Earliest Deadline First (EG-EDF) and Tabu search are based on the idea of filling gaps in the existing schedule. EG-EDF rule is able to build the schedule for all jobs incrementally by applying technique which fills earliest existing gaps in the schedule with newly arriving jobs. If no gap for a coming job is available EG-EDF rule uses Earliest Deadline First (EDF) strategy for including new job into the existing schedule. Such schedule is then optimized using the Tabu search algorithm moving jobs into earliest gaps again. Scheduling choices are taken to meet the Quality of Service (QoS) requested by the submitted jobs, and to optimize the usage of hardware resources. We compared the proposed solution with some of the most common queue-based scheduling algorithms like FCFS, EASY backfilling, and Flexible backfilling. Experiments shows that EG-EDF rule is able to compute good assignments, often with shorter algorithm runtime w.r.t. the other queue-based algorithms. Further Tabu search optimization results in higher QoS and machine usage while keeping the algorithm runtime reasonable.