Extending a Grid Scheduler with Dynamic Network Information

Grid technologies are emerging as the next generation of distributed computing, allowing the aggregation of resources that are geographically distributed across different locations. Entities involved in a Grid system (such as users, services, and data) need to communicate with each other over a network, hence network links are an essential part of a Grid system. Because of this, they should be considered as a parameter to decide about the convenience of using other different resources, such as CPU. This is, if the network links of a computing resource are overloaded, then this fact should affect whether this computing resource is chosen to run a user's job. All of this is achieved by means of a network-aware grid meta-scheduler, also known as Grid Network Broker, or GNB. This entity performs meta-scheduling of users' jobs to resources, and this task is done by taking into account the quality of the network links and their level of utilization. The purpose of this paper is to show an improvement on the scheduling algorithm of the GNB to use dynamic information on network performance, i.e. network buffers occupations in routers.