Performance evaluation of soft real-time scheduling for multicomputer cluster

Abstract

We consider scheduling soft real-time tasks for a cluster which consists of multiple servers. Each server provides identical services where an incoming task can be assigned to one of the servers. The question we investigate is which assignment produces the best performance given two alternative approaches to queue the arriving tasks: a centralized approach or a distributed one. A missed deadline criterion is used to evaluate these approaches. The influence of dispatching policies on the performance of the distributed approach is also considered.