A Genetic Algorithm to Schedule Workflow Collections on a SOA-Grid with Communication Costs

International audienceIn this paper we study the problem of scheduling a collection of workflows, identical or not, on a SOA grid. A workflow (job) is represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with typed tasks. All of the grid hosts are able to process a set of task types with unrelated processing costs and are able to transmit files through communication links for which the communication times are not negligible. The goal is to minimize the maximum completion time (makespan) of the workflows. To solve this problem we propose a genetic approach. The contributions of this paper are both the design of a Genetic Algorithm taking the communication costs into account and the performance analysis

Communication models insights meet simulations

International audienceIt is well-known that taking into account communications while scheduling jobs in large scale parallel computing platforms is a crucial issue. In modern hierarchical platforms, communication times are highly different when occurring inside a cluster or between clusters. Thus, allocating the jobs taking into account locality constraints is a key factor for reaching good performances. However, several theoretical results prove that imposing such constraints reduces the solution space and thus, possibly degrades the performances. In practice, such constraints simplify implementations and most often lead to better results. Our aim in this work is to bridge theoretical and practical intuitions, and check the differences between constrained and unconstrained schedules (namely with respect to locality and node contiguity) through simulations. We have developped a generic tool, using SimGrid as the base simulator, enabling interactions with external batch schedulers to evaluate their scheduling policies. The results confirm that insights gained through theoretical models are ill-suited to current architectures and should be reevaluated

Bi-objective Workflow Scheduling in Production Clouds: Early Simulation Results and Outlook

Proceedings of: First International Workshop on Sustainable Ultrascale Computing Systems (NESUS 2014). Porto (Portugal), August 27-28, 2014.We present MOHEFT, a multi-objective list scheduling heuristic that provides the user with a set of Pareto tradeoff optimal solutions from which the one that better suits the user requirements can be manually selected. We demonstrate the potential of our method for multi-objective workflow scheduling on the commercial Amazon EC2 Cloud by comparing the quality of the MOHEFT tradeoff solutions with a state-of-the-art multi-objective approach called SPEA2* for three types of synthetic workflows with different parallelism and load balancing characteristics. We conclude with an outlook into future research towards closing the gap between the scientific simulation and real-world experimentation.The work presented in this paper has been partially supported by EU under the COST programme Action IC1305, Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing (NESUS)

Model and complexity results for tree traversals on hybrid platforms

International audienceWe study the complexity of traversing tree-shaped workflows whose tasks require large I/O files. We target a heterogeneous architec- ture with two resource of different types, where each resource has its own memory, such as a multicore node equipped with a dedicated accelera- tor (FPGA or GPU). Tasks in the workflow are tagged with the type of resource needed for their processing. Besides, a task can be processed on a given resource only if all its input files and output files can be stored in the corresponding memory. At a given execution step, the amount of data stored in each memory strongly depends upon the ordering in which the tasks are executed, and upon when communications between both memories are scheduled. The objective is to determine an efficient traver- sal that minimizes the maximum amount of memory of each type needed to traverse the whole tree. In this paper, we establish the complexity of this two-memory scheduling problem, provide inapproximability results, and show how to determine the optimal depth-first traversal. Altogether, these results lay the foundations for memory-aware scheduling algorithms on heterogeneous platforms

Batsim: a Realistic Language-Independent Resources and Jobs Management Systems Simulator

International audienceAs large scale computation systems are growing to exascale, Resources and Jobs Management Systems (RJMS) need to evolve to manage this scale modification. However, their study is problematic since they are critical production systems, where experimenting is extremely costly due to downtime and energy costs. Meanwhile, many scheduling algorithms emerging from theoretical studies have not been transferred to production tools for lack of realistic experimental validation. To tackle these problems we propose Batsim, an extendable, language-independent and scalable RJMS simulator. It allows researchers and engineers to test and compare any scheduling algorithm, using a simple event-based communication interface, which allows different levels of realism. In this paper we show that Batsim's behaviour matches the one of the real RJMS OAR. Our evaluation process was made with reproducibility in mind and all the experiment material is freely available

From Simulation to Experiment: A Case Study on Multiprocessor Task Scheduling

International audienceSimulation is a popular approach for empirically evaluating the performance of algorithms and applications in the parallel computing domain. Most published works present results without quantifying simulation error. In this work we investigate accuracy issues when simulating the execution of parallel applications. This is a broad question, and we focus on a relevant case study: the evaluation of scheduling algorithms for executing mixed-parallel applications on clusters. Most such scheduling algorithms have been evaluated in simulation only. We compare simulations to real-world experiments in a view to identify which features of a simulator are most critical for simulation accuracy. Our first finding is that simple yet popular analytical simulation models lead to simulation results that cannot be used for soundly comparing scheduling algorithms. We then show that, by contrast, simulation models instantiated based on brute-force measurements of the target execution environment lead to usable results. Finally, we develop empirical simulation models that provide a reasonable compromise between the two previous approaches

Scheduling Independent Tasks on Multi-cores with GPU Accelerators

Best PaperInternational audienceMore and more computers use hybrid architectures combin-ing multi-core processors and hardware accelerators like GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). We present in this paper a new method for scheduling efficiently parallel applications with $m$ CPUs and $k$ GPUs, where each task of the application can be processed either on a core (CPU) or on a GPU. The objective is to minimize the makespan. The corresponding scheduling problem is NP-hard, we propose an efficient approximation algorithm which achieves an approximation ratio of $\frac{4}{3} + \frac{1}{3k}$ . We first detail and analyze the method, based on a dual approximation scheme, that uses a dynamic programming scheme to balance evenly the load between the heterogeneous resources. Finally, we run some simulations based on realistic benchmarks and compare the solution obtained by a relaxed version of this method to the one provided by a classical greedy algorithm and to lower bounds on the value of the optimal makespan

Mapping tree-shaped workflows on systems with different memory sizes and processor speeds

Directed acyclic graphs are commonly used to model scientific workflows, by expressing dependencies between tasks, as well as the resource requirements of the workflow. As a special case, rooted directed trees occur in several applications, for instance in sparse matrix computations. Since typical workflows are modeled by large trees, it is crucial to schedule them efficiently, so that their execution time (or makespan) is minimized. Furthermore, it is usually beneficial to distribute the execution on several compute nodes, hence increasing the available memory, and allowing us to parallelize parts of the execution. To exploit the heterogeneity of modern clusters in this context, we investigate the partitioning and mapping of tree‐shaped workflows on two types of target architecture models: in AM1, each processor can have a different memory size, and in AM2, each processor can also have a different speed (in addition to a different memory size). We design a three‐step heuristic for AM1, which adapts and extends previous work for homogeneous clusters [Gou C, Benoit A, Marchal L. Partitioning tree‐shaped task graphs for distributed platforms with limited memory. IEEE Trans Parallel Dist Syst 2020; 31(7): 1533–1544]. The changes we propose concern the assignment to processors (accounting for the different memory sizes) and the availability of suitable processors when splitting or merging subtrees. For AM2, we extend the heuristic for AM1 with a two‐phase local search approach. Phase A is a swap‐based hill climber, while (the optional) Phase B is inspired by iterated local search. We evaluate our heuristics for AM1 and AM2 with extensive simulations, and we demonstrate that exploiting the heterogeneity in the cluster significantly reduces the makespan, compared to the state of the art for homogeneous processors.Peer Reviewe