Scheduling in Distributed Systems

This paper presents several scheduling/coscheduling techniques employed in some recent research projects. Two types of local scheduling, proportional-sharing scheduling and predictive scheduling are introduced here. With proportional-share scheduling, the resource consumption rights of each active process are proportional to the relative shares that it is allocated. While the system implementing predictive scheduling can adapt to new architectures and/or algorithms and/or environmental changes automatically. Three types of coscheduling are discussed in this paper. Gang scheduling is a simple coscheduling mechanism that is widely used in distributed systems. While more sophisticated implicit coscheduling and dynamic coscheduling allow each local scheduler in the system to make independent decisions that dynamically coordinate the scheduling of cooperating processes across processors. Finally, this paper will give some discussion among these scheduling mechanisms and their combinations.