Backfilling with fairness and slack for parallel job scheduling

Parallel jobs have different runtimes and numbers of threads/processes. Thus, scheduling parallel jobs involves a packing problem. If jobs are packed as tightly as possible, utilization will be improved. Otherwise, some resources have to stay idle. The common solution to deal with idle resources is backfilling, which schedule smaller jobs submitted later to execute earlier as long as they do not postpone the first job or all the previous jobs in the waiting queue. Traditionally, backfilling uses first fit for idle resources, according to the submission order. However, in this case, better packing of jobs could be missed. Hence, we propose an algorithm which looks further ahead if significantly improving utilization. However at the same time, this could be unfair to some jobs ahead in the queue. So we use a delay factor as a constraint to limit unfairness. We propose a branch and bound algorithm which selects jobs for backfilling which keep utilization high, while trying to stay close to First-Come-First-Served (FCFS). We evaluate relative response time and utilization and compare to other backfilling approaches. The selection of jobs for backfilling to optimize for high utilization and low delay is implemented as an extension of the existing Scojo-PECT preemptive scheduler

Scheduling of data-intensive workloads in a brokered virtualized environment

Providing performance predictability guarantees is increasingly important in cloud platforms, especially for data-intensive applications, for which performance depends greatly on the available rates of data transfer between the various computing/storage hosts underlying the virtualized resources assigned to the application. With the increased prevalence of brokerage services in cloud platforms, there is a need for resource management solutions that consider the brokered nature of these workloads, as well as the special demands of their intra-dependent components. In this paper, we present an offline mechanism for scheduling batches of brokered data-intensive workloads, which can be extended to an online setting. The objective of the mechanism is to decide on a packing of the workloads in a batch that minimizes the broker's incurred costs, Moreover, considering the brokered nature of such workloads, we define a payment model that provides incentives to these workloads to be scheduled as part of a batch, which we analyze theoretically. Finally, we evaluate the proposed scheduling algorithm, and exemplify the fairness of the payment model in practical settings via trace-based experiments

LOMARC: Look ahead matchmaking for multi-resource coscheduling.

Hyper-Threading (HT) provides a new possibility for job coscheduling without context switch and without the cost for coordinating processes of one parallel job. However, HT achieves high processor throughput at the expense of reducing the performance of the individual process. Since the hardware resources are actually shared between two coscheduled jobs, the resource contention will harm the performance of each job. Most scheduling approaches only focus on the CPU without considering the impact on other resources. In this thesis we present LOMARC, a space-time sharing approach that takes multiple resources, including CPU, I/O, memory and network, into consideration for job coscheduling on HT processors. To improve resource utilization and reduce job response times, LOMARC matches two jobs with complementary resource requirements to coschedule. Our approach partially reorders the waiting job queue by lookahead to increase the possibility of finding a good match. LOMARC also generalizes for standard CPUs, using an adjusted matching scheme and only focusing on hiding I/O latency. In addition, LOMARC incorporates standard scheduling approaches such as priority ordering, aging and backfilling. In our simulation experiment, we use a realistic workload model to provide the convincing results. Our experimental results demonstrate that LOMARC delivers better performance than the standard space sharing approach and the other two job coscheduling approaches for HT processors. The performance gain is mainly due to an increased possibility of coscheduling two complementary jobs by looking ahead on the waiting queue. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-01, page: 0239. Adviser: Angela Sodan. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

Applying backfilling over a non-dedicated cluster

The resource utilization level in open laboratories of several universities has been shown to be very low. Our aim is to take advantage of those idle resources for parallel computation without disturbing the local load. In order to provide a system that lets us execute parallel applications in such a non-dedicated cluster, we use an integral scheduling system that considers both Space and Time sharing concerns. For dealing with the Time Sharing (TS) aspect, we use a technique based on the communication-driven coscheduling principle. This kind of TS system has some implications on the Space Sharing (SS) system, that force us to modify the way job scheduling is traditionally done. In this paper, we analyze the relation between the TS and the SS systems in a non-dedicated cluster. As a consequence of this analysis, we propose a new technique, termed 3DBackfilling. This proposal implements the well known SS technique of backfilling, but applied to an environment with a MultiProgramming Level (MPL) of the parallel applications that is greater than one. Besides, 3DBackfilling considers the requirements of the local workload running on each node. Our proposal was evaluated in a PVM/MPI Linux cluster, and it was compared with several more traditional SS policies applied to non-dedicated environmentsVI Workshop de Procesamiento Distribuido y Paralelo (WPDP)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Group-based optimization for parallel job scheduling in clusters via heuristic search

Job scheduling for parallel processing typically makes scheduling decisions on a per job basis due to the dynamic arrival of jobs. Such decision making provides limited options to find globally best schedules. Most research uses off-line optimization which is not realistic. We propose an optimization on the basis of limited-size dynamic job grouping per priority class. We apply heuristic domain-knowledge-based hi-level search and branch-and-bound methods to heavy workload traces to capture good schedules. Special plan-based conservative backfilling and shifting policies are used to augment the search. Our objective is to minimize average relative response times for long and medium job classes, while keeping utilization high. The scheduling algorithm is extended from the SCOJO-PECT coarse-grain pre-emptive time-sharing scheduler. The proposed scheduler was evaluated using real traces and Lublin-Feitelson synthetic workload model. The comparisons were made with the conservative SCOJO-PECT scheduler. The results are promising--the average relative response times were improved by 18-32 while still able to contain the loss of utilization within 2

The Resource Usage Aware Backfilling

Abstract. Job scheduling policies for HPC centers have been extensively stud-ied in the last few years, especially backfilling based policies. Almost all of these studies have been done using simulation tools. All the existent simulators use the runtime (either estimated or real) provided in the workload as a basis of their sim-ulations. In our previous work we analyzed the impact on system performance of considering the resource sharing (memory bandwidth) of running jobs including a new resource model in the Alvio simulator. Based on this studies we proposed the LessConsume and LessConsume Threshold resource selection policies. Both are oriented to reduce the saturation of the shared resources thus increasing the performance of the system. The results showed how both resource allocation poli-cies shown how the performance of the system can be improved by considering where the jobs are finally allocated. Using the LessConsume Threshold Resource Selection Policy, we propose a new backfilling strategy: the Resource Usage Aware Backfilling job scheduling policy. This is a backfilling based scheduling policy where the algorithms which decide which job has to be executed and how jobs have to be backfilled are based on a different Threshold configurations. This backfilling variant that considers how the shared resources are used by the scheduled jobs. Rather than backfilling the first job that can moved to the run queue based on the job arrival time or job size, it looks ahead to the next queued jobs, and tries to allocate jobs that would experience lower penalized runtime caused by the resource sharing saturation. In the paper we demostrate how the exchange of scheduling information between the local resource manager and the scheduler can improve substantially the per-formance of the system when the resource sharing is considered. We show how it can achieve a close response time performance that the shorest job first Back-filling with First Fit (oriented to improve the start time for the allocated jobs) providing a qualitative improvement in the number of killed jobs and in the per-centage of penalized runtime.

Applying backfilling over a non-dedicated cluster

The resource utilization level in open laboratories of several universities has been shown to be very low. Our aim is to take advantage of those idle resources for parallel computation without disturbing the local load. In order to provide a system that lets us execute parallel applications in such a non-dedicated cluster, we use an integral scheduling system that considers both Space and Time sharing concerns. For dealing with the Time Sharing (TS) aspect, we use a technique based on the communication-driven coscheduling principle. This kind of TS system has some implications on the Space Sharing (SS) system, that force us to modify the way job scheduling is traditionally done. In this paper, we analyze the relation between the TS and the SS systems in a non-dedicated cluster. As a consequence of this analysis, we propose a new technique, termed 3DBackfilling. This proposal implements the well known SS technique of backfilling, but applied to an environment with a MultiProgramming Level (MPL) of the parallel applications that is greater than one. Besides, 3DBackfilling considers the requirements of the local workload running on each node. Our proposal was evaluated in a PVM/MPI Linux cluster, and it was compared with several more traditional SS policies applied to non-dedicated environmentsVI Workshop de Procesamiento Distribuido y Paralelo (WPDP)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

What to consider for applying backfilling on non-dedicated environments

The resource utilization level in open laboratories of several universities has been shown to be very low. Our aim is to take advantage of those idle resources for parallel computation without disturbing the local load. In order to provide a system that lets us execute parallel applications in such a non-dedicated cluster, we use an integral scheduling system that considers both Space and Time sharing concerns. For dealing with the Time Sharing (TS) aspect, we use a technique based on the communicationdriven coscheduling principle. This kind of TS system has some implications on the Space Sharing (SS) system, that force us to modify the way job scheduling is traditionally done. In this paper, we analyze the relation between the TS and the SS systems in a non-dedicated cluster. As a consequence of this analysis, we propose a new technique, termed 3DBackfilling. This proposal implements the well known SS technique of backfilling, but applied to an environment with a MultiProgramming Level (MPL) of the parallel applications that is greater than one. Besides, 3DBackfilling considers the requirements of the local workload running on each node. Our proposal was evaluated in a PVM/MPI Linux cluster, and it was compared with several more traditional SS policies applied to non-dedicated environments.Facultad de Informátic