Abstract - With the emergence of distributed systems, the problem of task scheduling has been arousing attention in recent past. Task scheduling is a NP-complete problem and it is more complicated under the distributed heterogeneous computing environment. To harness the potential of these systems, efficient scheduling algorithms are needed. This paper proposes a new distributed scheduling algorithm for independent tasks to be assigned optimally amongst available machines. The approach works in two phases. In first phase, it assigns a task according to the Min-min heuristic and in second phase, it improves the scheduling by using efficient refinery scheduling heuristic. The refinery heuristic balances the load across all the machines and reduces the make-span time of jobs. The results obtained using the proposed heuristic improves over the existing approaches.

Index Terms - Scheduling, Heuristics, Load balancing, Grid computing.

Cite: Sunita Bansal and Chittaranjan Hota, "Efficient Refinery Scheduling Heuristic in Heterogeneous Computing Systems," Journal of Advances in Information Technology, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 159-164, August, 2011.doi:10.4304/jait.2.3.159-164