Bacterial foraging based hyper-heuristic for resource scheduling in grid computing

Grid computing is a form of distributed computing that co-ordinates and provides the facility of resource sharing over various geographical locations. Resource scheduling in Grid computing is a complex task due to the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of the resources. Bacterial foraging has recently emerged as a global optimization algorithm for distributed optimization and control. This paper proposes the use of the bacterial foraging optimization technique for Grid resource scheduling. A novel bacterial foraging based hyper-heuristic resource scheduling algorithm has been designed to effectively schedule the jobs on available resources in a Grid environment. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated with the existing common heuristics based scheduling algorithms through the GridSim toolkit. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms by minimizing cost and makespan of user applications submitted to the Grid. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.