Communication-aware Fault-tolerant Scheduling Strategy for Precedence Constrained Tasks in Heterogeneous Distributed Systems

Abstract

Abstract Fault-tolerant scheduling is an important issue for optimal heterogeneous distributed systems because of a wide range of resource failures. Primary-backup approach is a common methodology used for fault tolerance wherein each task has a primary copy and a backup copy on two different processors. For independent tasks, the backup copy can overload with other backup copies on the same processor, as long as their corresponding primary copies are scheduled on different processors. Unfortunately, most of the scheduling algorithms developed on a simple model where communication contention is not taken into account. In this paper we proposed a improve list scheduling algorithm, called heterogeneous communication-aware fault-tolerant scheduling (HCFS). The new approach for computing task priority is proposed which considers the performance difference in heterogeneous systems. Simulation results show that compared with existing scheduling algorithms in the literature, our scheduling algorithm improves the reliability and performance.