A Group based Fault Tolerant Scheduling Mechanism to Improve the Application Turnaround Time on Desktop Grids

Desktop grid is an exciting discipline for high throughput applications but due to inherent resource volatility, desktop grids are not feasible for short lived applications that require rapid turnaround time. Efficient and more knowledgeable resource selection mechanism can make it possible. In this paper, we propose a group based resource scheduling mechanism. The groups are made by using three measures: Collective impact of CPU and RAM, spot checking and task completion history. We evaluated the proposed mechanism over a network of 900 nodes having varied resources and behavior and found that excluding desktop resources on the basis of just clock rates is not a good idea and RAM should also, be considered as a collective parameter besides spot checking and task completion history. We also, show that the appropriate scheduling mechanisms can only be implemented after the grouping of resources on computing strength and behavior. The proposed mechanism ensures that tasks are allocated to hosts with higher probability of tasks completion that reduces tasks failures and improves fault tolerance