A Novel Workload Allocation Strategy for Batch Jobs

The distribution of computational tasks across a diverse set of geographically distributed heterogeneous resources is a critical issue in the realisation of true computational grids. Conventionally, workload allocation algorithms are divided into static and dynamic approaches. Whilst dynamic approaches frequently outperform static schemes, they usually require the collection and processing of detailed system information at frequent intervals - a task that can be both time consuming and unreliable in the real-world. This paper introduces a novel workload allocation algorithm for optimally distributing the workload produced by the arrival of batches of jobs. Results show that, for the arrival of batches of jobs, this workload allocation algorithm outperforms other commonly used algorithms in the static case. A hybrid scheduling approach (using this workload allocation algorithm), where information about the speed of computational resources is inferred from previously completed jobs, is then introduced and the efficiency of this approach demonstrated using a real world computational grid. These results are compared to the same workload allocation algorithm used in the static case and it can be seen that this hybrid approach comprehensively outperforms the static approach

Distributed data mining in grid computing environments

The official published version of this article can be found at the link below.The computing-intensive data mining for inherently Internet-wide distributed data, referred to as Distributed Data Mining (DDM), calls for the support of a powerful Grid with an effective scheduling framework. DDM often shares the computing paradigm of local processing and global synthesizing. It involves every phase of Data Mining (DM) processes, which makes the workflow of DDM very complex and can be modelled only by a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) with multiple data entries. Motivated by the need for a practical solution of the Grid scheduling problem for the DDM workflow, this paper proposes a novel two-phase scheduling framework, including External Scheduling and Internal Scheduling, on a two-level Grid architecture (InterGrid, IntraGrid). Currently a DM IntraGrid, named DMGCE (Data Mining Grid Computing Environment), has been developed with a dynamic scheduling framework for competitive DAGs in a heterogeneous computing environment. This system is implemented in an established Multi-Agent System (MAS) environment, in which the reuse of existing DM algorithms is achieved by encapsulating them into agents. Practical classification problems from oil well logging analysis are used to measure the system performance. The detailed experiment procedure and result analysis are also discussed in this paper

Using Pilot Systems to Execute Many Task Workloads on Supercomputers

High performance computing systems have historically been designed to support applications comprised of mostly monolithic, single-job workloads. Pilot systems decouple workload specification, resource selection, and task execution via job placeholders and late-binding. Pilot systems help to satisfy the resource requirements of workloads comprised of multiple tasks. RADICAL-Pilot (RP) is a modular and extensible Python-based pilot system. In this paper we describe RP's design, architecture and implementation, and characterize its performance. RP is capable of spawning more than 100 tasks/second and supports the steady-state execution of up to 16K concurrent tasks. RP can be used stand-alone, as well as integrated with other application-level tools as a runtime system

Collocation Games and Their Application to Distributed Resource Management

We introduce Collocation Games as the basis of a general framework for modeling, analyzing, and facilitating the interactions between the various stakeholders in distributed systems in general, and in cloud computing environments in particular. Cloud computing enables fixed-capacity (processing, communication, and storage) resources to be offered by infrastructure providers as commodities for sale at a fixed cost in an open marketplace to independent, rational parties (players) interested in setting up their own applications over the Internet. Virtualization technologies enable the partitioning of such fixed-capacity resources so as to allow each player to dynamically acquire appropriate fractions of the resources for unencumbered use. In such a paradigm, the resource management problem reduces to that of partitioning the entire set of applications (players) into subsets, each of which is assigned to fixed-capacity cloud resources. If the infrastructure and the various applications are under a single administrative domain, this partitioning reduces to an optimization problem whose objective is to minimize the overall deployment cost. In a marketplace, in which the infrastructure provider is interested in maximizing its own profit, and in which each player is interested in minimizing its own cost, it should be evident that a global optimization is precisely the wrong framework. Rather, in this paper we use a game-theoretic framework in which the assignment of players to fixed-capacity resources is the outcome of a strategic "Collocation Game". Although we show that determining the existence of an equilibrium for collocation games in general is NP-hard, we present a number of simplified, practically-motivated variants of the collocation game for which we establish convergence to a Nash Equilibrium, and for which we derive convergence and price of anarchy bounds. In addition to these analytical results, we present an experimental evaluation of implementations of some of these variants for cloud infrastructures consisting of a collection of multidimensional resources of homogeneous or heterogeneous capacities. Experimental results using trace-driven simulations and synthetically generated datasets corroborate our analytical results and also illustrate how collocation games offer a feasible distributed resource management alternative for autonomic/self-organizing systems, in which the adoption of a global optimization approach (centralized or distributed) would be neither practical nor justifiable.NSF (CCF-0820138, CSR-0720604, EFRI-0735974, CNS-0524477, CNS-052016, CCR-0635102); Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana; COLCIENCIAS–Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la Tecnología "Francisco José de Caldas