Application level scheduling of gene sequence comparison on metacomputers
Neil T. Spring, Rich Wolski · 2014
This paper investigates the efficacy of ApplicationLevel Scheduling (AppLeS) [3] for a parallel gene sequence library comparison application in production metacomputing settings. We compare an AppLeSenhanced version of the application to an original implementation designed and tuned to use the native scheduling mechanisms of Mentat [6] -- a metacomputing software infrastructure. The experimental data shows that the AppLeS versions outperform the best Mentat versions over a range of problem sizes and computational settings. The structure of the AppLeS we have defined for this application does not depend on the scheduling algorithms that it uses. Instead, the AppLeS scheduler considers the uncertainty associated with the information it uses in its scheduling decisions to choose between the static placement of computation, and the dynamic assignment of computation during execution. We propose that this framework is general enough to represent the class of metacomputing applications that a...