Grid architecture for scheduling and load balancing — An assessment

Grid Computing emerged as a wide scale distributed system to offer dynamic coordinated resources sharing and high performance computing. Grid coordinates the resources that are not subject to centralized control. It uses standard open, general purpose protocols and its interfaces. Grid delivers non-trivial qualities of service such as the response time, throughput, availability and security. Grid computing is being adopted in various areas from academic, industry research to government use. Grids are becoming platforms for high performance and distributed computing. Grid computing is the next generation IT infrastructure that promises to transform the way organizations and individuals compute, communicate and collaborate. The goal of Grid computing is to create the illusion of a simple but large and powerful self-managing virtual computer out of a large collection of connected heterogeneous systems sharing various combinations of resources. Scheduling is a set of rules and policies that control the order by which various jobs are executed in a system. Load balancing deals with the way by which the various tasks are assigned to the resources thereby improving the system performance. Scheduling of various tasks to the resources in a Grid environment is an active research area. Resources are dynamic in nature so the load of resources varies with change in configuration of Grid so the Load Balancing of the tasks in a Grid environment can significantly influence Grid's performance. A poor scheduling policy may leave many processors idle while a clever one may consume an unduly large portion of the total CPU cycles. In order to utilize the resources efficiently and to satisfy the requirement of the users, several scheduling algorithms have been proposed by researchers for various applications. This paper deals with the overview of the Grid Computing concepts, the various standards associated with it, the terms associated with scheduling and load balancing and the tools associated with Grid Scheduling. The paper also deals with the review of the various grid scheduling algorithms along with the proposed model for scheduling.