Divisible load applications consist of a load, that is input data
and associated computation, that can be divided arbitrarily into independent
pieces. Such applications arise in many fields and are ideally suited to a
master-worker execution, but they poseseveral scheduling challenges. While the
``Divisible Load Scheduling'' (DLS) problem has been studied extensively from a
theoretical standpoint, in this paper we focus on practical issues: we extend a
production Grid application execution environment, APST, to support divisible
load applications; we implement previously proposed DLS algorithms as part of
APST; we evaluateand compare these algorithms on a real-world two-cluster
platform; we show in a casestudy how a user can easily and effectively run a
real-world divisible load application; and we uncover several issues that are
critical for using DLS theory in practice effectively. To the best of our
knowledgethe software resulting from this work, APST-DV, is the first usable
and generic tool fordeploying divisible load applications on distributed
computing platforms.
Pre-2018 CSE ID: CS2004-0802
