Chemical reaction optimization for task scheduling in grid computing

Abstract

Grid computing solves high performance and high-throughput computing problems through sharing resources ranging from personal computers to supercomputers distributed around the world. One of the major problems is task scheduling, i.e., allocating tasks to resources. In addition to Makespan and Flowtime, we also take reliability of resources into account, and task scheduling is formulated as an optimization problem with three objectives. This is an NP-hard problem, and thus, metaheuristic approaches are employed to find the optimal solutions. In this paper, several versions of the Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) algorithm are proposed for the grid scheduling problem. CRO is a population-based metaheuristic inspired by the interactions between molecules in a chemical reaction. We compare these CRO methods with four other acknowledged metaheuristics on a wide range of instances. Simulation results show that the CRO methods generally perform better than existing methods and performance improvement is especially significant in large-scale applications. © 2011 IEEE.