Contention-aware Resource Provisioning in Interconnected Grid Computing Systems

Resource sharing environments enable sharing and aggregation of resources across several resource providers. InterGrid provides an architecture for resource sharing based on virtual machine technology between Grids. Resource providers in InterGrid serve their local requests as well as external requests assigned by InterGrid. However, resource providers would like to ensure that the requirements of their local requests are not delayed because of running external requests. This scenario leads to contention for resources between the external and local requests. In this dissertation, preemption mechanism is considered to resolve the contention, while side-effects of this mechanism are taken into account. Particularly, the number of preempted external requests, their waiting time, and imposed overhead of preemption are considered. Therefore, this dissertation investigates and categorises mechanisms for management of resource contention in the existing systems. Then, it presents a contention management scheme that includes two main strategies. The first strategy avoids the contentious situation by establishing contention-awareness in the scheduling policies. The second strategy, handles contention side-effects while considering long waiting time and energy consumption issues. These strategies are proposed within different architectural elements of the InterGrid platform. In this dissertation, first feasibility of the preemption mechanism to resolve resource contention is presented, then overhead time imposed for performing various preemption scenarios are modelled, and different policies to minimise the side-effects of resource contention are proposed. To avoid resource contention, a scheduling policy is proposed in gateway (meta-scheduling) level, that proactively disseminates external requests on resource providers. Also, a dispatch policy is proposed to decrease the likelihood of resource contention for more valuable external users. To prevent long waiting time for external requests, an admission control policy is proposed to limit the number of accepted external requests when there is a surge in demand. Then, a contention-aware energy management policy is proposed to adapt energy consumption of resource providers to user demand. This policy is for situation that resource providers operate at low utilisation and it considers long waiting time for external requests. Performance evaluations of the strategies are achieved using discrete-event simulation. This dissertation also realises the proposed scheme in InterGrid.