Economic scheduling in Grid computing using Tender models

Economic scheduling needs to be considered for Grid computing environment, because it gives an incentive for resource providers to supply their resources. Moreover, it enforces efficient use of resources, because the users have to pay for theiruse. Tendering is a suitable model for Grid scheduling because users start the negotiations for finding suitable resources for executing their jobs. Furthermore, theusers specify their job requirements with their requests and therefore the resourcesreply with bids that are based on the cost of taking on the job and the availability of their processors. In this thesis, a framework for economic Grid schedulingusing tendering is proposed. The framework entities such as users, brokers andresources employ tender/contract-net model to negotiate the prices and deadlines.The brokers’ role is acting on behalf of users. During the negotiations, the entitiesaim to maximise their performance which is measured by a number of metrics.In order to evaluate the entities’ performance under different scenarios, a Java-based simulator, called MICOSim, supporting event-driven simulation of economicGrid scheduling is presented. MICOSim can perform a simulation of more thanone hundred entities faster than real time. It is concluded from the evaluationthat users who are interested in increasing the job success rate and paying less forexecuting their jobs have to consider received prices to select the most appropriate bids, while users who are interested in improving the job average satisfaction ratehave to consider either received completion time or both price and completion timeto select the most suitable bids when the submission of jobs is static. The bestbroker strategy is the one that doesn’t take into account meeting the job deadlinesin the bids it sends to job owners. Finally, the resource strategy that considersthe price to determine if to reply to a request or not is superior to other resourcestrategies. The only exception is employing this strategy with price that is toolow. However, there is a tiny difference between the performances of different userstrategies in dynamic submission. It is also concluded from the evaluation thatbroker strategies have the best performance when the revenue they target from theusers is reasonable. Thus, the broker’s aim has to be receiving reasonable revenue(neither too low nor too high) from acting on behalf of users. It is observedfrom the results that the strategy performance is influenced by the behaviour ofother entities such as the submission time of user jobs. Finally, it is observedthat the characteristics of entities have an effect on the performance of strategies.For example, the two user strategies that consider the received completion timeand both price and completion time to determine if to accept a broker bid havesimilar performance, because of the existence of resources with various prices fromcheap to expensive and existence of resources which don’t care about the pricepaid for the execution. So, the price threshold doesn’t have a large effect on theperformance.