Project scheduling in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment

摘要

A genetic algorithm is described to determine a near-optimal schedule for assigning heterogeneous computations to resources in a heterogeneous computational environment. The genetic algorithm evolves a computation-to-compute resource mapping optimized with respect to a set of inter-dependent, and possibly conflicting objectives including cost of computation, data transfer cost, time to complete computation, profitability, etc. A set of scheduling plans are randomly created and then evaluated and assigned a fitness value based on the ability to meet a set of weighted objectives. Scheduling plans having desirable fitness values are selected as parents to procreate one or more new scheduling plans, each new plan inheriting resource mappings from at least two parents. This evolutionary process is repeated until the fitness values across scheduling plans converge or a time threshold is exceeded. At the end of evolution, a scheduling plan with the best assigned value is chosen for scheduling.