On the importance of migration for fairness in online grid markets

Computational grids offer users a simple access to tremendous computer resources for solving large scale computing problems. Traditional performance analysis of scheduling algorithms considers overall system performance while fairness analysis focuses on the individual performance each user receives. Until recently, only few grids and cluster systems provided preemptive migration (e.g. [2]), which is the ability of dynamically moving computational tasks across machines during runtime. The emergent technology of virtualization (e.g. [4]) provides off-the-shelf support for migration, thus making the use of this feature more accessible (even across different OS's). In this paper, we study the close relation between migration and fairness. We present fairness and quality of service properties for economic online scheduling algorithms. Under mild assumptions we show that it is impossible to achieve these properties without the use of migration. On the other hand, if zero cost migratio...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Lior Amar, Ahuva Mu'alem, Jochen Stößer
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, ATAL 2008, Grids Offer Users, Intelligent Agents, Scheduling Algorithms