This volume presents meta-heuristics approaches for Grid scheduling problems. It brings new ideas, analysis, implementations and evaluation of meta-heuristic techniques for Grid scheduling, which make this volume novel in several aspects.

During the past decades scheduling has been among the most studied op- mization problemsanditisstillanactiveareaofresearch!Schedulingappears in many areas of science, engineering and industry and takes di?erent forms depending on the restrictions and optimization criteria of the operating en- ronments [8]. For instance, in optimization and computer science, scheduling has been de?ned as “the allocation of tasks to resources over time in order to achieve optimality in one or more objective criteria in an e?cient way” and in production as “production schedule, i. e. , the planning of the production or the sequence of operations according to which jobs pass through machines and is optimal with respect to certain optimization criteria. ” Although there is a standardized form of stating any scheduling problem, namely “e?cient allocation ofn jobs onm machines –which can process no more than one activity at a time– with the objective to optimize some - jective function of the job completion times”, scheduling is in fact a family of problems. Indeed, several parameters intervene in the problem de?nition: (a) job characteristics (preemptive or not, precedence constraints, release dates, etc. ); (b) resource environment (single vs. parallel machines, un- lated machines, identical or uniform machines, etc. ); (c) optimization criteria (minimize total tardiness, the number of late jobs, makespan, ?owtime, etc. ; maximize resource utilization, etc. ); and, (d) scheduling environment (static vs. dynamic,intheformerthenumberofjobstobeconsideredandtheirready times are available while in the later the number of jobs and their charact- istics change over time).

This research aims at designing and building a scheduling framework for distributed computing systems with the primary objectives of providing fast response times to the users, delivering high system throughout and accommodating maximum number of applications into the systems. The author claims that the above mentioned objectives are the most important objectives for scheduling in recent distributed computing systems, especially Grid computing environments. In order to achieve the objectives of the scheduling framework, the scheduler employs arbitration of application-level schedules and preemption of executing jobs under certain conditions. In application-level scheduling, the user develops a schedule for his application using an execution model that simulates the execution behavior of the application. Since application-level scheduling can seriously impede the performance of the system, the scheduling framework developed in this research arbitrates between different application-level schedules corresponding to different applications to provide fair system usage for all applications and balance the interests of different applications. In this sense, the scheduling framework is not a classical scheduling system, but a meta-scheduling system that interacts with the application-level schedulers. Due to the large system dynamics involved in Grid computing systems, the ability to preempt executing jobs becomes a necessity. The meta-scheduler described in this dissertation employs well defined scheduling policies to preempt and migrate executing applications. In order to provide the users with the capability to make their applications preemptible, a user-level checkpointing library called SRS (Stop-Restart Software) was also developed by this research. The SRS library is different from many user-level checkpointing libraries since it allows reconfiguration of applications between migrations. This reconfiguration can be achieved by changing the processor configuration and/or data distribution. The experimental results provided in this dissertation demonstrates the utility of the metascheduling framework for distributed computing systems. And lastly, the metascheduling framework was put to practical use by building a Grid computing system called GradSolve. GradSolve is a flexible system and it allows the application library writers to upload applications with different capabilities into the system. GradSolve is also unique with respect to maintaining traces of the execution of the applications and using the traces for subsequent executions of the application.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications, and Technologies, PDCAT 2021, which took place in Guangzhou, China, during December 17-19, 2021. The 24 full papers and 34 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. The papers are categorized into the following topical sub-headings: networking and architectures, software systems and technologies, algorithms and applications, and security and privacy.

This book represents the combined peer-reviewed proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing - IDC-2013, of the Second Workshop on Agents for Clouds - A4C-2013, of the Fifth International Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems Technology and Semantics - MASTS-2013, and of the International Workshop on Intelligent Robots - iR-2013. All the events were held in Prague, Czech Republic during September 4-6, 2013. The 41 contributions published in this book address many topics related to theory and applications of intelligent distributed computing and multi-agent systems, including: agent-based data processing, ambient intelligence, bio-informatics, collaborative systems, cryptography and security, distributed algorithms, grid and cloud computing, information extraction, intelligent robotics, knowledge management, linked data, mobile agents, ontologies, pervasive computing, self-organizing systems, peer-to-peer computing, social networks and trust, and swarm intelligence.

This book solicits the innovative research ideas and solutions for almost all the intelligent data intensive theories and application domains. The proliferation of various mobile and wireless communication networks has paved way to foster a high demand for intelligent data processing and communication technologies. The potential of data in wireless mobile networks is enormous, and it constitutes to improve the communication capabilities profoundly. As the networking and communication applications are becoming more intensive, the management of data resources and its flow between various storage and computing resources are posing significant research challenges to both ICT and data science community. The general scope of this book covers the design, architecture, modeling, software, infrastructure and applications of intelligent communication architectures and systems for big data or data-intensive applications. In particular, this book reports the novel and recent research works on big data, mobile and wireless networks, artificial intelligence, machine learning, social network mining, intelligent computing technologies, image analysis, robotics and autonomous systems, data security and privacy.