A genetic algorithm for independent job scheduling in grid computing

Grid computing refers to the infrastructure which connects geographically distributed computers owned by various organizations allowing their resources, such as computational power and storage capabilities, to be shared, selected, and aggregated. Job scheduling is the problem of mapping a set of jobs to a set of resources. It is considered one of the main steps to efficiently utilise the maximum capabilities of grid computing systems. The problem under question has been highlighted as an NP-complete problem and hence meta-heuristic methods represent good candidates to address it. In this paper, a genetic algorithm with a new mutation procedure to solve the problem of independent job scheduling in grid computing is presented. A known static benchmark for the problem is used to evaluate the proposed method in terms of minimizing the makespan by carrying out a number of experiments. The obtained results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than some known algorithms taken from the literature.