Title: Robust scheduling of moldable parallel jobs

Authors: Sudha Srinivasan, Savitha Krishnamoorthy, P. Sadayappan

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, 395 Dreese Laboratories, 2015 Neil Avenue, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, 395 Dreese Laboratories, 2015 Neil Avenue, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, 395 Dreese Laboratories, 2015 Neil Avenue, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA

Abstract: Moldable job scheduling has been shown to be promising compared with traditional job scheduling policies. In contrast to rigid job scheduling where the number of processors for a job is fixed by the user, with moldable job scheduling the number of processors allocated to each job is chosen by the scheduler from a given range. Using simulation-based experiments, we show that previously proposed moldable scheduling strategies are not very robust – overall performance improves in some circumstances, but worsens under other circumstances, and considerably degrades performance for some categories of jobs. This paper proposes a more robust strategy for scheduling moldable jobs, which outperforms the rigid scheduling scheme and previous moldable scheduling strategies. The new strategy performs well under different load conditions and for jobs of different scalabilities.

Keywords: job scheduling; moldable jobs; scalability; robustness; performance evaluation; cluster computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2004.008913

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2004 Vol.2 No.2/3/4, pp.120 - 132

Published online: 02 Feb 2006 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article