A New Duplication-Based Approach for Scheduling Tasks to a Heterogeneous Workstation Cluster
YK Kwok · 1999
Triggered by the ever increasing advancements in processor and networking technology, a cluster of workstations and/or PCs connected by a high-speed network has become a viable and cost-effective platform for the execution of computation intensive parallel applications. However, realizing the goal of efficient cluster computing entails handling a number of resource management chores. In particular, the problem of scheduling tasks to a cluster is a relatively less explored topic. Specifically, there are two difficult research issues to be tackled in the scheduling problem for cluster computing: (1) how to reduce the communication overhead of executing a parallel application on a workstations cluster; (2) how to exploit the benefits of heterogeneity in a cluster of machines for a parallel application. In this paper, we propose a duplication based approach in scheduling tasks to a heterogeneous cluster of workstations. In duplication based scheduling, critical tasks are redunda...