New scheduling approach using reinforcement learning for heterogeneous distributed systems

Abstract Computer clusters, cloud computing and the exploitation of parallel architectures and algorithms have become the norm when dealing with scientific applications that work with large quantities of data and perform complex and time-consuming calculations. With the rise of social media applications and smart devices, the amount of digital data and the velocity at which it is produced have increased exponentially, determining the development of distributed system frameworks and platforms that increase productivity, consistency, fault-tolerance and security of parallel applications. The performance of such systems is mainly influenced by the architectural disposition and composition of the physical machines, the resource allocation and the scheduling of jobs and tasks. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning algorithm to solve the scheduling problem in distributed systems. The machine learning technique takes into consideration the heterogeneity of the nodes and their disposition within the grid, and the arrangement of tasks in a directed acyclic graph of dependencies, ultimately determining a scheduling policy for a better execution time. This paper also proposes a platform, in which the algorithm is implemented, that offers scheduling as a service to distributed systems.