Space-Sharing Scheduling Schemes for NOW with Heterogeneous Computing Power
Jinsung Kim, Young-Chul Shim · Jeongbo gwahaghoe nonmunji. si'seu'tem mich i'lon · 2000
NOW(Network of Workstations) is considered as a platform for running parallel programs by many people. One of the fundamental problems that must be addressed to achieve good performance for parallel programs on NOW is the determination of efficient job scheduling policies. Currently most research on NOW assumes that all the workstations in the NOW have the same processing power. In this paper we consider a NOW in which workstations may have different computing power. We introduce 10 classes of space sharing-based scheduling policies that can be applied to the NOW with heterogeneous computing power. We compare the performance of these scheduling policies by using the simulator which accepts synthetically generated sequential and parallel workloads and generates the response time and waiting time of parallel jobs as performance indices of various scheduling strategies. Through the experiments the case when a parallel program is partitioned heterogeneously in proportion to the computing power of workstations is shown to have better performance than when a parallel program is partitioned into parallel processes of the same size. When the owner returns to the workstation which is executing a parallel process, the policy which just lowers the priority of the parallel process shows better performance than the one which migrates the parallel process to a new idle workstation. Among the policies which use heterogeneous partitioning and process priority lowering, the adaptive policy performed best across the wide range of inter-arrival time of parallel programs but when the load imbalance among parallel processes becomes very high, the modified adaptive policy performed better.