Quality-of-service driven visual scheduling in grid computing

To make full use of grid resources and to meet users' requirements, efficient scheduling is a key concern in grid environments. Aiming at grid-based engineering computation applications, this paper proposes a Quality of Service (QoS) driven user-centric scheduling strategy. Firstly, degree of credit and degree of guarantee are defined, and aggregate utility ratio is modeled as a composite QoS; Secondly, for different types of grid users, two scheduling methods and steering-enabled visual interfaces are presented, respectively; Thirdly, four performance metrics and aggregate utility ratio are visualized to facilitate the user's interaction with scheduling; Finally, corresponding post-scheduling mechanisms are designed to cope with scenarios where scheduled tasks could not obtain expected QoS. This study is part of a grid project, MASSIVE, and the experiments show that the visual scheduling strategy presented is suitable for computational grids.