Performance evaluation of bag of gangs scheduling in a heterogeneous distributed system

Distributed systems deliver a cost-effective and scalable solution to the increasing performance intensive applications by utilizing several shared resources. Gang scheduling is considered to be an efficient time-space sharing scheduling algorithm for parallel and distributed systems. In this paper we examine the performance of scheduling strategies of jobs which are bags of independent gangs in a heterogeneous system. A simulation model is used to evaluate the performance of bag of gangs scheduling in the presence of high priority jobs implementing migrations. The simulation results reveal the significant role of the implemented migration scheme as a load balancing factor in a heterogeneous environment. Another significant aspect of implementing migrations presented in this paper is the reduction of the fragmentation caused in the schedule by gang scheduled jobs and the alleviation of the performance impact of the high priority jobs. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.