Scheduling in Desktop Grid Systems: Theoretical Evaluation of Policies & Frameworks

Abstract

Desktop grid systems have already established their identity in the area of distributed systems. They are well suited for High Throughput Computing especially for Bag-of-Tasks applications. In desktop grid systems, idle processing cycles and memory of millions of users (connected through internet or through any other communication mechanism) can be utilized but the workers / hosts machines not under any centralized administrative control that result in high volatility. This issue is countered by applying various types of scheduling policies that not only ensure task assignments to better workers but also takes care of fault tolerance through replication and other mechanism. In this paper, we discussed leading desktop grid systems framework and performed a comparative analysis of these frameworks. We also presented a theoretical evaluation of server and client based scheduling policies and identified key performance indicators to evaluate these policies.