Advances in network and middleware technologies have brought computing with many widely-distributed and heterogeneous resources to the forefront, both in the context of Grid Computing and of Internet Computing. These large distributed platforms allow scientists to solve problems at an unprecedented scale and/or at greatly reduced cost. The high level goal of this work is to further the development of software methodologies and algorithms to enable scientists, engineers and others to use large heterogeneous distributed systems.
Application domains that can readily benefit from such platforms are many; they include computational neuroscience, factoring large numbers, genomics, volume rendering, protein docking, or even searching for extra-terrestrial life. Indeed, those applications are characterized by large numbers of independent tasks, which makes it possible to deploy them on distributed platforms with high network latencies. More specifically, in this work we assume that all application data initially resides in a single repository, and that the time required to transfer that data is a significant factor. Efficiently managing the resulting computation is a difficult and challenging problem, given the heterogeneous and typically dynamic attributes of the underlying components. Such an approach allows for adaptivity and scalability, since decisions and changes can be made locally. This approach is particularly effective for scheduling in environments that are heterogenous, dynamic, and unstructured, such as global and peer-to-peer computing platforms consisting mostly of home PC's.
This research develops a simple yet general computation and communication model for Grid and Internet platforms, and autonomous and decentralized scheduling techniques based on this model. It analyzes the optimality of these techniques in terms of steady-state and overall application performance. Further, it encorporates adaptability and fault-tolerance, and evaluates the resulting techniques by both simulating and running real applications on actual testbeds. Its overall impact to the scientific community is to enable scientists to solve important classes of problems faster and in a more cost-effective fashion.
