Virtual Savant for the Heterogeneous Computing Scheduling Problem

A key issue when using distributed computing environments is finding a planning strategy to execute tasks in order to use the computational resources efficiently. This article presents the application of Virtual Savant to solve the heterogeneous computing scheduling problem, a widely-studied problem with several real-world applications. Virtual Savant is a novel method that uses machine learning techniques to automatically generate programs that can be executed in parallel to solve a given problem. Experimental analysis is performed on a set of problem instances generated following methodologies from the related literature. Results show that Virtual Savant is able to outperform MinMin, a well-known heuristic for the studied problem, by up to 15% while showing good scalability properties when increasing the number of computing resources and the dimension of the problem instances.