Representing Job Scheduling for Volunteer Grid En- vironment using Online Container Stowage

Volunteer grid computing comprises of volunteer resources which are unpredictable in nature and as such the scheduling of jobs among these resources could be very uncertain. It is also difficult to ensure the successful completion of submitted jobs on volunteer resources as these resources may opt to withdraw from the grid system anytime or there might be a resource failure, which requires job reassignments. However, a careful consideration of future jobs can make scheduling of jobs more reliable on volunteer resources. There are two possibilities; either to forecast the future jobs or to forecast the resource availability by studying the history events. In this paper an attempt has been made to utilize the future job forecasting in improving the job scheduling experience with volunteer grid resources. A scheduling approach is proposed that uses container stowage to allocate the volunteer grid resources based on the jobs submitted. The proposed scheduling approach optimizes the number of resources actively used. The approach presents online container stowage adaptability for scheduling jobs using volunteer grid resources. The performance has been evaluated by making comparison to other scheduling algorithms adopted in volunteer grid. The simulation results have shown that the proposed approach performs better in terms of average turnaround and waiting time in comparison with existing scheduling algorithms. The job load forecast also reduced the number of job reassignments. Keywords—Volunteer grid computing; volunteer resources; container stowage; job scheduling