Cooperation in multi-organization scheduling

The distributed nature of the grid results in the problem of scheduling parallel jobs produced by several independent organizations that have partial control over the system. We consider systems in which each organization owns a cluster of processors. Each organization wants its tasks to be completed as soon as possible. In this paper, we model an off-line system consisting of N identical clusters of m processors. We show that it is always possible to produce a collaborative solution that respects participants' selfish goals, at the same time improving the global performance of the system. We propose an algorithm (called MOLBA) with a guaranteed worst-case performance ratio on the global makespan, equal to 4. Next, we show that a better bound (equal to 3) can be obtained in a specific case when the last completed job requires at most m/2 processors. Then, we derive another algorithm (called ILBA) that in practice improves the proposed, guaranteed solution by further balancing the schedules. Finally, by an extensive evaluation bit simulation, we show that the algorithms are efficient on typical instances. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.