Incentive-based scheduling for market-like computational grids

A sustainable, market-like computational grid has two characteristics: it must allow resource providers and resource consumers to make autonomous scheduling decisions; and both parties of providers and consumers must have sufficient incentives to stay and play in the market. In this paper, we formulate this intuition of optimizing incentives for both parties as a dual-objective scheduling problem. The two objectives identified are to maximize the success rate of job execution, and to minimize fairness deviation among resources. The challenge is to develop a grid scheduling scheme that enables individual participants to make autonomous decisions while produces a desirable emergent property in the grid system, namely, the two objectives are achieved simultaneously. We present an incentive-based scheduling scheme which utilizes a peer-to-peer decentralized scheduling framework, a set of local heuristic algorithms, and three market instruments of job announcement, price, competition degree. The performance of this scheme is evaluated via extensive simulation using synthetic and real workloads. The results show that our approach outperforms other scheduling schemes in optimizing incentives for both consumers and providers, leading to highly successful job execution and fair profit allocation.