P2PScheMe: a P2P scheduling mechanism for workflows in grid computing

Complex scientific experiments have a growing demand for computational resources, which are expensive to be acquired and maintained. Grid computing has emerged as the mainstream technology to solve this issue. Grids are also adequate for the execution of scientific workflows because they allow the use of heterogeneous and distributed resources. In spite of the progress in grid technology, there are challenges to overcome in workflow scheduling. For instance, centralized scheduling solutions may lead to performance degradation and to problems with scalability. Some scheduling approaches are partially distributed, keeping a few centralized components that may become bottlenecks. Other distributed solutions have a lack of flexibility in the definition of workflows, in which only the use of tasks as steps in the workflow is permitted not high level services. In this work, we present P2PScheMe, a scheduling mechanism for peer‐to‐peer execution of workflows based on the invocation of grid services. The proposal considers information regarding grid execution environment in order to allow workflow scheduling adaptation. This adaptation is performed according to user requirements of quality of service. In this paper, we describe how P2PScheMe works and provides a comparative analysis with existing solutions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.