Adaptive scheduling for parameter sweep applications in grid

A kind of adaptive scheduling was introduced to keep the approximate balance of grid load during parameter sweep applications' running. To adapt to the dynamic of resource capabilities, a parameter application was divided into some jobs scheduled sequentially. After each job finished its running, the feedback information about grid load was used to adjust the scheduling of next job to fit into the fluctuations of resource capacities, thus approximate grid load balancing could be implemented while the next job was running. Each job was divided into some sub-jobs which were assigned to different grid resources. According to sub-job execution time, a grid load vector was constructed, from which a gird load unbalance index indicating the unbalance extent of gird load during job's run was obtained. The load vector was used to adjust the partition of next job, and the unbalance index was used to change the scale of next job. The smaller indexes made job scale increase more rapidly, thus the increase of scheduling cost was slower than that of application scale. The experiments show that the adaptive scheduling can keep approximate balance of grid load, and can shorten the total execution time of parameter applications in contrast with the static scheduling based on resource performance.