Dynamic Task Scheduling using Genetic Algorithms for Heterogeneous Distributed Computing

Abstract

An algorithm has been developed to dynamically schedule heterogeneous tasks on heterogeneous processors in a distributed system. The scheduler operates in an environment with dynamically changing resources and adapts to variable system resources. It operates in a batch fashion and utilises a genetic algorithm to minimise the total execution time. We have compared our scheduler to six other schedulers, three batch-mode and three immediate-mode schedulers. We have performed simulations with randomly generated task sets, using uniform, normal, and Poisson distributions, whilst varying the communication overheads between the clients and scheduler. We have achieved more efficient results than all other schedulers across a range of different scenarios while scheduling 10,000 tasks on up to 50 heterogeneous processors.