A peer-to-peer meta-scheduler for service-oriented grid environments

Meta-scheduling in a Grid is aimed at enabling the efficient sharing of computing resources managed by different local schedulers within a single organization or scattered across several administrative domains. Since current Grid metaschedulers operate in a centralized fashion and thus are single points of failure, we present a distributed meta-scheduler for a service-oriented Grid environment based on peer-to-peer (P2P) networking techniques and ant colony optimization algorithms adapted to a P2P network. In the proposed approach, the meta-scheduling process provides automatic load balancing, is completely decentralized, fault tolerant, scalable, and does not require complex administration. Experimental results demonstrate that scheduling decisions are made quickly and lead to a good balance of the computational load.