A cost-based online scheduling algorithm for job assignment on computational grids

The computational grid provides a promising platform for the deployment of various high-performance computing applications. Problem in implementing computational grid environments is how to effectively use various resources in the system, such as compute cycle, memory, communication network, and data repository. There are many effective heuristic algorithms for scheduling in the computational grid, however most scheduling strategies have no theoretical guarantees at all. This paper expands on the previous work, which considers CPU and memory with economic principle in the cluster environment. A cost-based online scheduling algorithm is presented for job assignment in the grid environment, and the performance of the algorithm is analyzed against the performance of the optimal offline algorithm.