Iterative-improvement-based heuristics for adaptive scheduling of tasks sharing files on heterogeneous master-slave environments

The scheduling of independent but file-sharing tasks on heterogeneous master-slave platforms has recently found important applications in Grid environments. The scheduling heuristics recently proposed for this problem are all constructive in nature and based on a common greedy criterion which depends on the momentary completion time values of the tasks. We show that this greedy decision criterion has shortcomings in exploiting the file-sharing interaction among tasks since completion time values are inadequate to extract the global view of this interaction. We propose a three-phase scheduling approach which involves initial task assignment, refinement, and execution ordering phases. For the refinement phase, we model the target application as a hypergraph and, with an elegant hypergraph-partitioning-like formulation, we propose using iterative-improvement-based heuristics for refining the task assignments according to two novel objective functions. Unlike the turnaround time, which is the actual schedule cost, the smoothness of proposed objective functions enables the use of iterative-improvement-based heuristics successfully since their effectiveness and efficiency depend on the smoothness of the objective function. Experimental results on a wide range of synthetically generated heterogeneous master-slave frameworks show that the proposed three-phase scheduling approach performs much better than the greedy constructive approach. © 2006 IEEE.