Grid scheduling by on-line rectangle packing

The Grid computing paradigm is originated from a new computing infrastructure for scientific research and cooperation, and is becoming an established technology for large-scale resource sharing and distributed integration. Two main problems arise: how to efficiently allocate resources to tasks and, after this, how to schedule them. In this article we propose to solve the scheduling phase by means of rectangle packing algorithms. In particular, two on-line rectangle packing algorithms are proposed with the objective of maximizing the system efficiency. A wide computational analysis is provided. The performances of the proposed algorithms are first compared with those of known algorithms on benchmark instances for rectangle packing, and then are evaluated on different Grid scheduling scenarios associated with different processing and dataset environments.