A new resource mapping technique for Grid workflows in advance reservation environments

Advance reservation can ensure the future availability of the Grid's heterogeneous resources and help a scheduler to produce better schedules. We propose a new resource mapping technique for jobs of a Grid workflow in an advance reservation environment. Using the Dynamic Critical Path for Grid (DCP-G) scheduling algorithm's job selection method, our proposed technique considers the conditional mapping of parent and child jobs to the same resource, trying to minimise the communication duration between jobs and thus optimising workflow completion time. For a number of different workflows, the schedules computed by our technique are compared with those computed by DCP-G, a workflow scheduling algorithm that is known to outperform many other popular scheduling heuristics. The results show that our proposed resource mapping technique yields improved schedules along with the significant improvement in the CPU time as the size of the workflow increases.