A meta-scheduler with auction based resource allocation for global grids

As users increasingly require better quality of service from Grids, resource management and scheduling mechanisms have to evolve in order to satisfy competing demands on limited resources. Traditional schedulers for Grids are system centric and favour system performance over increasing user’s utility. On the other hand market oriented schedulers are price-based systems that favour users but are based solely on user valuations. This paper proposes a novel meta-scheduler that unifies the advantages of both the systems for benefiting both users and resources. In order to do that, we design a valuation metric for user’s applications and computational resources based on multi-criteria requirements of users and resource load. The meta-scheduler maps user applications to suitable distributed resources using a Continuous Double Auction (CDA). Through simulation, we compare our scheduling mechanism against other common mechanisms used by current meta-schedulers. The results show that our meta-scheduler mechanism can satisfy more users than the others while still meeting traditional system-centric performance criteria such as average load and deadline of applications.