An On-line Algorithm for Fair-Share Node Allocations in a Cluster
Lior Amar, Amnon Barak, Ely Levy, Michael S. Okun · 2007
Proportional (fair) share schedulers are designed to provide applications with predefined portions of system resources. Single node operating systems use context-switch (preemption) to dynamically allocate the CPU(s) to running processes. This paper presents an online algorithm for proportional share allocations of nodes in a cluster, in a fashion that resembles a single-node system. The algorithm relies on preemptive process migrations for dynamic allocations of nodes to users. The paper presents the algorithm and its performance on a MOSIX organizational Grid with 60 nodes. We show that proportional share allocations can be achieved in a relatively short time (minutes).