Robust Scheduling for Bag-of-Tasks Applications Through Task Replication

Scheduling independent tasks on heterogeneous environments, like Grids, is not trivial. To make a good scheduling plan on this kind of environments is usually needed prediction information like host speed, host load, task size and network load. This kind of information is not always available and is often dif f icult to obtain. In this paper we propose an approach that does not use any kind of prediction information but delivers good performance. Our approach uses task replication to cope with the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of Grids without depending on any information about machines or tasks. Our results show that task replication can deliver good and stable performance with minimal additional resource consumption.