QoS and preemption aware scheduling in federated and virtualized Grid computing environments

Resource provisioning is one of the challenges in federated Grid environments. In these environments each Grid serves requests from external users along with local users. Recently, this resource provisioning is performed in the form of Virtual Machines (VMs). The problem arises when there are insufficient resources for local users to be served. The problem gets complicated further when external requests have different QoS requirements. Serving local users could be solved by preempting VMs from external users which impose overheads on the system. Therefore, the question is how the number of VM preemptions in a Grid can be minimized. Additionally, how we can decrease the likelihood of preemption for requests with more QoS requirements. We propose a scheduling policy in InterGrid, as a federated Grid, which reduces the number of VM preemptions and dispatches external requests in a way that fewer requests with QoS constraints get affected by preemption. Extensive simulation results indicate that the number of VM preemptions is decreased at least by 60%, particularly, for requests with more QoS requirements. ► We consider a federation of Grids where external requests have different QoS requirements. ► We propose a workload allocation policy and a dispatch policy. ► We examine the number of VM preemptions that take place. ► Proposed workload allocation policy significantly decreases the number of VM preemptions. ► Proposed dispatch policy reduces the likelihood of pre-empting external requests with higher QoS requirements.