Experiences with scheduling and mapping games for adaptive distributed systems : Summary

Abstract

We apply the concept of "games with a purpose" to NPcomplete mapping and scheduling problems in distributed systems and report our experiences. The particular context is a scheduling and mapping problem that emerges when running parallel applications in a distributed virtualized computing environment, specifically BSP applications in our Virtuoso system. We describe the design and implementation of an interface that presents the problem as a game, and a user study we undertook to evaluate the interface. The results show that there is promise at least at small scales, most of our naive users are able to find solutions that are reasonable.