Passive Network Awareness as a Means for Improved Grid Scheduling

Grids enable sharing resources of heterogeneous nature and administration. In such distributed systems, the network is usually taken for granted which is potentially problematic due to the complexity and unpredictability of public networks that typically underlie grids. This article introduces GridMAP, a mechanism for considering the network state for enhancing grid scheduling. Network measurements are collected in a passive manner from a user-centric vantage point. This mechanism has been evaluated on a production e-science grid infrastructure, with results showing the ability of GridMAP to improve grid scheduling with minimal network, computational and deployment overheads.