Question

Thresholds for reliability in grid computing

Answer 1

Over the past several years, a heterogeneous computing (HC) system has become more competitive as a commercial computing platform than a homogeneous system. With the growing scale of HC systems, network failures become inevitable. To achieve high performance, communication reliability should be considered while designing reliability-aware task scheduling algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm called RMSR (Replication-based scheduling for Maximizing System Reliability), which incorporates task communication into system reliability. To maximize communication reliability, an improved algorithm which searches all optimal reliability communication paths for current tasks is proposed. During the task replication phase, the task reliability threshold is determined by users and each task has dynamic replicas. Our comparative studies for both randomly generated graphs and application graphs of real-world problems show that our RMSR algorithm outperforms existing scheduling algorithms in terms of system reliability. For randomly generated graphs, several factors affecting the performance are analyzed in the paper. For an application graph of a real-world problem with a fixed DAG, the system reliability of the RMSR algorithm is at most influenced by one factor.

Answer 2

In recent years, grid technology has emerged as an important tool for solving compute-intensive problems
within the scientific community and in industry. To further the development and adoption of this tech-
nology, researchers and practitioners from different disciplines have collaborated to produce standard
specifications for implementing large-scale, interoperable grid systems.