Distributed and dynamic self-scheduling of parallel MPI grid applications

The execution of distributed applications on the Grid is already a reality. However, as both the number of applications grow and Grids increase in scale, the efficient utilization of the available but shared heterogeneous resources will become increasingly essential to the Grid's successful maturity. Furthermore, it is unclear whether existing Grid management systems are capable of meeting this challenge. The EasyGrid middleware is a hierarchically distributed application management system (AMS) that is embedded into MPI applications to autonomously orchestrate their execution efficiently in computational Grids. The overhead of employing a distinct AMS to make each application system aware brings at least two benefits. First, the adopted policies can be tailored to the specific needs of each application, leading to improved performance. Second, distributing the management effort among executing applications makes Grid management more scalable. This article focuses on scheduling policies of an AMS for a particular class of application, describing a low intrusion implementation of a hybrid scheduling strategy designed to elicit good performance even in dynamic environments such as Grids. Using application-specific scheduling policies, near-optimal runtimes highlight the advantages of self-scheduling when executing one or more system aware applications on a Grid. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.