A Web Interface for Meta-Heuristics Based Grid Schedulers Fatos Xhafa Department of Languages and Informatics Systems Technical University of Catalonia, Spain Email: fatos@lsi.upc.edu Joanna Kolodziej Department of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Bielsko-Biala, Poland Email: jkolodziej@ath.bielsko.pl Marcin Bogda´ nski Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science University of Bielsko-Biala, Poland Email: marcin.bogdanski@gmail.com Abstract—The use of meta-heuristics for designing efficient Grid schedulers is currently a common approach. One issue related to Grid based schedulers is their evaluation under different Grid configurations, such as dynamics of tasks and machines, task arrival, scheduling policies, etc. In this paper we present a web application that interfaces the final user with several meta-heuristics based Grid schedulers. The application interface facilities for each user the remote evaluation of the different heuristics, the configuration of the schedulers as well as the configuration of the Grid simulator under which the schedulers are run. The simulation results and traces are graphically represented and stored at the server and can retrieved in different formats such as spreadsheet form or pdf files. Historical executions are as well kept enabling a full study of use cases for different types of Grid schedulers. Thus, through this application the user can extract useful knowledge about the behavior of different schedulers by simulating realistic conditions of Grid system without needing to install and configure any specific software. Keywords-Web interface, Grid scheduling, Simulation, Meta- heuristic. I. I NTRODUCTION Grid computing has emerged as a wide area distributed platform for solving the large-scale problems in science, engineering, etc. Computational Grid involves the combi- nation of many computing resources into a network for the execution of computational tasks. The resources are distributed across multiple organizations, administrative do- mains having their own access, usage policies and local schedulers. The tasks scheduling and the effective manage- ment of the resources in such systems are complex and therefore, demands sophisticated tools for analyzing the algorithms performances before applying them to the real systems. Simulation seems to be the most suitable way to analyze scheduling algorithms in large-scale distributed dynamic systems like Grid environment. It simplify the study of schedulers performances and avoid the overhead of co- ordination of the resources, which usually happens in the real-life Grid scenarios. Simulation is also effective in work- ing with very large problems that require involvement of a large number of active users and resources, which is usually very hard to coordinate and build for real-life approaches. Moreover, in order to make useful the analysis of the performance and parameters tuning of different scheduling algorithms, a considerable number of independent runs is needed to ensure significant statistical results, which can be easily realized with Grid simulator. Despite the work on the Grid simulation packages, there are still few research works on development of full-featured interfaces for Grid simulation packages. As a matter of fact, current Grid simulation packages are run through command line. In this work we propose a user-friendly Web interface to remote users and benefit from easy use features of the interface for running the HyperSim-G simulator. The proposed Web application, namely WEBGRID 1 , facilitates the evaluation of the different scheduling heuristics, the configuration of the schedulers as well as the configuration of the Grid simulator, under which the schedulers are run. The simulation results and traces are graphically represented and stored at the server and can retrieved in different formats such as spreadsheet form or pdf files. Historical executions are stored in the system, which enables a full study of use cases for different types of Grid schedulers. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Sec- tion II we highlight the Grid scheduling problems types and selected resolution methods. The HyperSim-G simulator as well as its integration with various schedulers are briefly described in Section III. In Section IV we present the main aspects of the Web application architecture and show its application in solving a specified instance of Grid scheduling problem. Finally, we conclude this work in Section V. II. SCHEDULING IN GRID SYSTEMS A. Scheduling Problems The purpose of the schedulers is to efficiently and opti- mally allocate tasks originated by applications to a set of available resources. In general, both tasks and resources could be dynamically added/dropped to/from the system. Scheduling in Grids remains a challenging NP-complete global optimization problem because of the large-scale het- erogeneous structure of the system, and the existence of 1 The application is available at the following Web page: http://weboptserv.lsi.upc.edu/WEBGRID/ 2010 International Conference on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing 978-0-7695-4237-9/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/3PGCIC.2010.67 405