DDDQN‐TS: A task scheduling and load balancing method based on optimized deep reinforcement learning in heterogeneous computing environment

Abstract

Task scheduling and load balancing problem of heterogeneous computing environment (HCE) is getting more and more attention these days and has become a research hotspot in this field. The task scheduling and load balancing problem of heterogeneous environment, which refers to assigning a set of tasks to a specific set of machines with different hardware and different computing performance with the goal of minimizing task processing time and keeping load balance among machines, has been proved to be an NP-complete problem. The development of artificial intelligence provides new ideas to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel task scheduling and load balancing method based on optimized deep reinforcement learning in HCE. First, we formulate task scheduling problem as a Markov decision process and then adopt a dueling double deep Q-learning network to search the optimal task allocation solution. Then we use two well-known large-scale cluster data sets Google Cloud Jobs data set and Alibaba Cluster Trace data set to validate our approach. The experimental results show that compared with other existing solutions, our proposed method can achieve much shorter task response time and better load balancing effect.