Towards providing reliable job completion time predictions using PCS

In this paper we build a case for providing job completion time predictions to cloud users, similar to the delivery date of a package or arrival time of a booked ride. Our analysis reveals that providing predictability can come at the expense of performance and fairness. Existing cloud scheduling systems optimize for extreme points in the trade-off space, making them either extremely unpredictable or impractical. To address this challenge, we present PCS, a new scheduling framework that aims to provide predictability while balancing other traditional objectives. The key idea behind PCS is to use Weighted-Fair-Queueing (WFQ) and find a suitable configuration of different WFQ parameters (e.g., class weights) that meets specific goals for predictability. It uses a simulation-aided search strategy, to efficiently discover WFQ configurations that lie on the Pareto front of the trade-off space between these objectives. We implement and evaluate PCS in the context of DNN job scheduling on GPUs. Our evaluation, on a small scale GPU testbed and larger-scale simulations, shows that PCS can provide accurate completion time estimates while marginally compromising on performance and fairness

Cost-minimizing preemptive scheduling of mapreduce workloads on hybrid clouds

MapReduce has become the dominant programming model for processing massive amounts of data on cloud platforms. More and more enterprises are now utilizing hybrid clouds, consisting of private infrastructure owned by themselves and public clouds such as Amazon EC2, to process their spiky MapReduce workloads, which fully utilize their own on-premise resources while outsourcing the tasks only when needed. With disparate workloads of different MapReduce tasks, an efficient scheduling mechanism is in need to enable efficient utilization of the on-premise resources and to minimize the task outsourcing cost, while meeting the task completion time requirements as well. In this paper, a fine-grained model is described to characterize the scheduling of heterogeneous MapReduce workloads, and an online algorithm is proposed for joint task admission control into the private cloud, task outsourcing to the public cloud, and VM allocation to execute the admitted tasks on the private cloud, such that the time-averaged task outsourcing cost is minimized over the long run. The online algorithm features preemptive scheduling of the tasks, where a task executed partially on the on-premise infrastructure can be paused and scheduled to run later. It also achieves desirable properties such as meeting a pre-set task admission ratio and bounding the worst-case task completion time, as proven by our rigorous theoretical analysis. © 2013 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Limited Preemptive Scheduling for Real-Time Systems: a Survey

The question whether preemptive algorithms are better than nonpreemptive ones for scheduling a set of real-time tasks has been debated for a long time in the research community. In fact, especially under fixed priority systems, each approach has advantages and disadvantages, and no one dominates the other when both predictability and efficiency have to be taken into account in the system design. Recently, limited preemption models have been proposed as a viable alternative between the two extreme cases of fully preemptive and nonpreemptive scheduling. This paper presents a survey of the existing approaches for reducing preemptions and compares them under different metrics, providing both qualitative and quantitative performance evaluations

SLO-aware Colocation of Data Center Tasks Based on Instantaneous Processor Requirements

In a cloud data center, a single physical machine simultaneously executes dozens of highly heterogeneous tasks. Such colocation results in more efficient utilization of machines, but, when tasks' requirements exceed available resources, some of the tasks might be throttled down or preempted. We analyze version 2.1 of the Google cluster trace that shows short-term (1 second) task CPU usage. Contrary to the assumptions taken by many theoretical studies, we demonstrate that the empirical distributions do not follow any single distribution. However, high percentiles of the total processor usage (summed over at least 10 tasks) can be reasonably estimated by the Gaussian distribution. We use this result for a probabilistic fit test, called the Gaussian Percentile Approximation (GPA), for standard bin-packing algorithms. To check whether a new task will fit into a machine, GPA checks whether the resulting distribution's percentile corresponding to the requested service level objective, SLO is still below the machine's capacity. In our simulation experiments, GPA resulted in colocations exceeding the machines' capacity with a frequency similar to the requested SLO.Comment: Author's version of a paper published in ACM SoCC'1

Learning Scheduling Algorithms for Data Processing Clusters

Efficiently scheduling data processing jobs on distributed compute clusters requires complex algorithms. Current systems, however, use simple generalized heuristics and ignore workload characteristics, since developing and tuning a scheduling policy for each workload is infeasible. In this paper, we show that modern machine learning techniques can generate highly-efficient policies automatically. Decima uses reinforcement learning (RL) and neural networks to learn workload-specific scheduling algorithms without any human instruction beyond a high-level objective such as minimizing average job completion time. Off-the-shelf RL techniques, however, cannot handle the complexity and scale of the scheduling problem. To build Decima, we had to develop new representations for jobs' dependency graphs, design scalable RL models, and invent RL training methods for dealing with continuous stochastic job arrivals. Our prototype integration with Spark on a 25-node cluster shows that Decima improves the average job completion time over hand-tuned scheduling heuristics by at least 21%, achieving up to 2x improvement during periods of high cluster load