Task granularity policies for deploying bag-of-task applications on global grids

Deploying lightweight tasks individually on grid resources would lead to a situation where communication overhead dominates the overall application processing time. The communication overhead can be reduced if we group the lightweight tasks at the meta-scheduler before the deployment. However, there is a necessity to limit the number of tasks in a group in order to utilise the resources and the interconnecting network in an optimal manner. In this paper, we propose policies and approaches to decide the granularity of a task group that obeys the task processing requirements and resourcenetwork utilisation constraints while satisfying the user’s QoS requirements. Experiments on bag-of-task applications reveal that the proposed policies and approaches lead towards an economical and efficient way of grid utilisation. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.