Application of Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization for Grid Task Scheduling Problem

Abstract

Many applications involve the concepts of scheduling, such as communications, packet routing, production planning [Zhai et al., 2006], classroom arrangement [Mathaisel & Comm, 1991], aircrew scheduling [Chang, 2002], nurse scheduling [Ohki et al., 2006], food industrial [Simeonov & Simeonovova, 2002], control system [Fleming & Fonseca, 1993], resource-constrained scheduling problem [Chen, 2007] and grid computing. There are many different types of scheduling problems such as real-time, job-shop, permutation flow-shop, project scheduling and other scheduling problems have been studied intensively. However, in this work, the studied grid task scheduling problem is much more complex than above stated classic task scheduling problems. Restated, a grid application is regarded as a task scheduling problem involving tasks with inter-communication and distributed homogeneous or heterogeneous resources, and can be represented by a task interaction graph (TIG). Grid is a service for sharing computing power and data storage capacity over the Internet. The grid systems outperform simple communication between computers and aims ultimately to turn the global network of computers into one vast computational resource. Grid computing can be adopted in many applications, such as high-performance applications, large-output applications, data-intensive applications and community-centric applications. These applications major concern to efficiently schedule tasks over the available multi-processor environment provided by the grid. A grid is a collaborative environment in which one or more tasks can be submitted without knowing where the resources are or even who owns the resources [Foster et al., 2001]. The efficiency and effectiveness of grid resource management greatly depend on the scheduling algorithm [Lee et al., 2007]. Generally, in the grid environment, these resources are different over time, and such changes will affect the performance of the tasks running on the grid. In grid computing, tasks are assigned among grid system [Salman, 2002]. The purpose of task scheduling in grid is to find optimal task-processor assignment and hence minimize application completion time (total cost). Most scheduling problems in these applications are categorized into the class of NP-complete problems. This implies that it would take amount of computation time to obtain an optimal solution, especially for a large-scale scheduling problem. A variety of approaches have been applied to solve scheduling problems, such as