Efficient Real-Time Divisible Load Scheduling with Advance Reservations

Providing QoS and performance guarantees to arbitrarily divisible loads has become a significant problem for many cluster-based research computing facilities. With the emergence of Grid applications that require simultaneous access to multi-site resources, supporting advance reservations in a cluster has become increasingly important. While progress is being made in scheduling arbitrarily divisible loads, current approaches either do not support advance reservations, or are not efficient. In this paper, we propose a linear algorithm for real-time divisible load scheduling that supports advance reservations in a cluster. Unlike existing approaches, the new algorithm relaxes the tight coupling between the task admission controller and the task dispatcher. By eliminating the need to generate exact schedules in the admission controller, the algorithm avoids high overhead. Our approach also addresses the under-utilization concerns raised by advance reservations.