Towards service level agreement based scheduling on the grid

The orchestration of complex workflows on the Grid is emerging as a key goal for the Grid community. It is nec-essary for these workflows to be executed reliably, respecting any dependences; it is also desirable for the user to know (al-beit approximately) when the workflow will complete. The authors argue that meeting these goals will necessitate a ma-jor shift in the underlying scheduling technology, which is ultimately used to execute any computational tasks contained in these workflows. This position paper describes a recently funded project that aims to establish a fundamental new infrastructure for effi-cient job scheduling on the Grid, based on a notion of Service Level Agreements. These are negotiated between the client (user, superscheduler, or broker) and the scheduler, contain information on acceptable job start and end times, and may be re-negotiated during runtime