Heuristic Scheduling and Process Migration on the Grid

Reducing the response time of genomic application programs is important for correctly analyzing genomic information in practical periods. The Grid can provide high processing power to reduce the response time of such application programs. To reduce response time and efficiently use computational resources on the Grid, scheduling and process migration are important. InterProScan is a quite useful genomic application program widely used by genomic researchers. However, it is designed and implemented for one computer or a small PC cluster system, and its scheduling scheme is quite simple, allocating one scanning tool to a fixed computer configured at installation time. Furthermore, InterProScan does not have any process migration scheme, and process migration has to be considered to provide flexible execution on the Grid. This paper presents heuristic scheduling and process migration schemes for InterProScan on the Grid. Several scheduling schemes are implemented and evaluated on OBIGrid, an experimental Grid for bioinformatics being developed by Japan Committees. This paper also discusses the problems of applying process migration to the scheduling scheme we implemented.