Stochastic scheduling and workload allocation : QoS support and profitable brokering in computing grids

The Grid can be seen as a collection of services each of which performs some functionality. Users of the Grid seek to use combinations of these services to perform the overall task they need to achieve. In general this can be seen as a set of services with a workflow document describing how these services should be combined. The user may also have certain constraints on the workflow operations, such as execution time or cost to the user, specified in the form of a Quality of Service (QoS) document. The users submit their workflow to a brokering service along with the QoS document. The brokering service's task is to map any given workflow to a subset of the Grid services taking the QoS and state of the Grid into account -- service availability and performance. We propose an approach for generating constraint equations describing the workflow, the QoS requirements and the state of the Grid. This set of equations may be solved using Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), which is the traditional method. We further develop a novel 2-stage stochastic MILP which is capable of dealing with the volatile nature of the Grid and adapting the selection of the services during the lifetime of the workflow. We present experimental results comparing our approaches, showing that the 2-stage stochastic programming approach performs consistently better than other traditional approaches. Next we addresses workload allocation techniques for Grid workflows in a multi-cluster Grid. We model individual clusters as MIMIk queues and obtain a numerical solution for missed deadlines (failures) of tasks of Grid workflows. We also present an efficient algorithm for obtaining workload allocations of clusters. Next we model individual cluster resources as G/G/l queues and solve an optimisation problem that minimises QoS requirement violation, provides QoS guarantee and outperforms reservation based scheduling algorithms. Both approaches are evaluated through an experimental simulation and the results confirm that the proposed workload allocation strategies combined with traditional scheduling algorithms performs considerably better in terms of satisfying QoS requirements of Grid workflows than scheduling algorithms that don't employ such workload allocation techniques. Next we develop a novel method for Grid brokers that aims at maximising profit whilst satisfying end-user needs with a sufficient guarantee in a volatile utility Grid. We develop a develop a 2-stage stochastic MILP which is capable of dealing with the volatile nature of the Grid and obtaining cost bounds that ensure that end-user cost is minimised or satisfied and broker's profit is maximised with sufficient guarantee. These bounds help brokers know beforehand whether the budget limits of end-users can be satisfied and, if not, then obtain appropriate future leases from service providers. Experimental results confirm the efficacy of our approach.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo