A Fair Decentralized Scheduler for Bag-of-Tasks Applications on Desktop Grids

Desktop Grids have become very popular nowadays, with projects that include hundred of thousands computers. Desktop grid scheduling faces two challenges. First, the platform is volatile, since users may reclaim their computer at any time, which makes centralized schedulers inappropriate. Second, desktop grids are likely to be shared among several users, thus we must be particularly careful to ensure a fair sharing of the resources. In this paper, we propose a decentralized scheduler for bag-of-tasks applications on desktop grids, which ensures a fair and efficient use of the resources. It aims to provide a similar share of the platform to every application by minimizing their maximum stretch, using completely decentralized algorithms and protocols.