A Survey on Grid Scheduling Systems

Thanks to vast improvements in wide-area network performance and powerful yet low-cost computers, Grid computing has emerged as a promising attractive computing paradigm. Computational Grids aim to aggregate the power of heterogeneous, geographically distributed, multiple-domain-spanning computational resources to provide high performance or high-throughput computing. To achieve the promising potentials of computational Grids, an effective and efficient scheduling system is fundamentally important. Scheduling systems for traditional distributed environments do not work in Grid environments because the two classes of environments are radically distinct. Scheduling in Grid environments is significantly complicated by the unique characteristics of Grids. This survey focuses on the design of scheduling systems for computational Grids. First, this survey investigates challenges for designing scheduling system for computational Grids. Second, a Grid scheduling framework and a common Grid scheduler architecture are proposed. Next, a comprehensive taxonomy for describing Grid scheduling systems is also presented. Finally, a number of representative Grid scheduling systems are surveyed in detail.