Studying the Influence of Network-Aware Grid Scheduling on the Performance Received by Users

Grid computing is the key enabling technology to aggregate geographically distributed resources in the context of a particular application. As Grids are extremely distributed systems, requirements on the communication network should also be taken into account when performing usual tasks such as scheduling, migrating or monitoring of jobs. Note that users, services, and data need to communicate with each other over networks, thus the network should be used in an efficient and fault-tolerant way. There are Grid schedulers that consider the network when performing their tasks, but the way they have been implemented does not allow easy extensions. Thus, they are not suitable to be modified and try different scheduling approaches. The authors have extended the GridWay metascheduler to perform scheduling considering the network status. This is the first step in order to proceed with more complicated and efficient scheduling and reservation processes. In this work, the extension has been evaluated by means of a testbed, in which users simultaneously submit different jobs with different frequencies to GridWay. Results presented here show that the response time perceived by Grid users is reduced when data on network performance are considered in the job scheduling process.