Abstract Scheduling is essentially a decision-making process that enables resource sharing among a number of activities by determining their execution order on the set of available resources. The emergence of distributed systems brought new challenges on scheduling in computer systems, including clusters, grids, and more recently clouds. On the other hand, the plethora of research makes it hard for both newcomers researchers to understand the relationship among different scheduling problems and strategies proposed in the literature, which hampers the identification of new and relevant research avenues. In this paper we introduce a classification of the scheduling problem in distributed systems by presenting a taxonomy that incorporates recent developments, especially those in cloud computing. We review the scheduling literature to corroborate the taxonomy and analyze the interest in different branches of the proposed taxonomy. Finally, we identify relevant future directions in scheduling for distributed systems.
As claim in their scheduling review @cite_11 , parallel job scheduling reviews are needed in a regular basis. The purpose of their short review was to introduce clusters and grids into the parallel job scheduling literature. Indeed, the authors present an introduction to job scheduling in grids, highlighting differences between a parallel computer and the grid. They point out cross-domain load balancing and co-allocations as two main concerns when scheduling in grids. In our work, we introduce a classification of schedulers in distributed systems that comprises a more extensive view of grid computing algorithms. Moreover, we highlight new requirements for the cloud computing emergent paradigm as well as its differences to grid computing.
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The popularity of research on the scheduling of parallel jobs demands a periodic review of the status of the field. Indeed, several surveys have been written on this topic in the context of parallel supercomputers [17, 20]. The purpose of the present paper is to update that material, and to extend it to include work concerning clusters and the grid. One of the main challenges in Grid systems is designing an adaptive, scalable, and model-independent method for job scheduling to achieve a desirable degree of load balancing and system efficiency. Centralized job scheduling methods have some drawbacks, such as single point of failure and lack of scalability. Moreover, decentralized methods require a coordination mechanism with limited communications. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent approach to job scheduling in Grid, named Centralized Learning Distributed Scheduling (CLDS), by utilizing the reinforcement learning framework. The CLDS is a model free approach that uses the information of jobs and their completion time to estimate the efficiency of resources. In this method, there are a learner agent and several scheduler agents that perform the task of learning and job scheduling with the use of a coordination strategy that maintains the communication cost at a limited level. We evaluated the efficiency of the CLDS method by designing and performing a set of experiments on a simulated Grid system under different system scales and loads. The results show that the CLDS can effectively balance the load of system even in large scale and heavy loaded Grids, while maintains its adaptive performance and scalability. The problem of optimally scheduling tasks onto heterogeneous resources in grids, minimizing the makespan of these tasks, has proved to be NP-complete. There is no best scheduling algorithm for all grid computing systems. An alternative is to select an appropriate scheduling algorithm to use in a given grid environment because of the characteristics of the tasks, machines and network connectivity. In this paper a survey is presented on the problem and the different aspects of job scheduling in grids such as (a) fault-tolerance; (b) security; and (c) simulation of grid job scheduling strategies are discussed. This paper also presents a discussion on the future research topics and the challenges of job scheduling in grids. To program in distributed computing environments such as grids and clouds, workflow is adopted as an attractive paradigm for its powerful ability in expressing a wide range of applications, including scientific computing, multi-tier Web, and big data processing applications. With the development of cloud technology and extensive deployment of cloud platform, the problem of workflow scheduling in cloud becomes an important research topic. The challenges of the problem lie in: NP-hard nature of task-resource mapping; diverse QoS requirements; on-demand resource provisioning; performance fluctuation and failure handling; hybrid resource scheduling; data storage and transmission optimization. Consequently, a number of studies, focusing on different aspects, emerged in the literature. In this paper, we firstly conduct taxonomy and comparative review on workflow scheduling algorithms. Then, we make a comprehensive survey of workflow scheduling in cloud environment in a problem---solution manner. Based on the analysis, we also highlight some research directions for future investigation.