Efficient QoS Resource Management for Heterogeneous Grids

QoS support is of crucial importance to the adoption of Grid technologies. Advance reservations is one mechanism that can be employed to provide QoS; however, its deployment is limited due to the lack of flexibility and scalability of existing implementations. Furthermore, the inherent heterogeneity of resources in Grid environments makes the task of providing QoS even more formidable. In this work we consider two aspects of advance reservations. First, we investigate the impact of heterogeneity on Grid resource management. Second, we employ techniques from computational geometry to develop an efficient heterogeneity-aware scheduling algorithm. Our main finding is that Grids may benefit from high levels of resource heterogeneity, independently of the total system capacity. Our results show that our algorithm performs well across several user and system performance metrics and overcomes the lack of scalability and adaptability of existing mechanisms. Index Terms Grid computing, advance reservations, quality of service, resource allocation, scheduling algorithms