3DBackfilling: A Space-Sharing Approach for Non-Dedicated Clusters.
Mauricio Hanzich, Porfídio Hernández, Emilio Luque, Francesc Giné, Francesc Solsona · 2005
The resource utilization level in open laboratories of several universities has been shown to be very low. Our aim is to take advantage of those idle resources for parallel computation without disturbing the local load. In order to provide a system that lets us execute parallel applications in such a non-dedicated cluster, we use an integral scheduling system that considers both Space and Time sharing concerns. To deal with the Time Sharing (TS) aspect, we use a technique based on the communication-driven coscheduling principle. This kind of TS system has some implications on the Space Sharing (SS) system that force us to modify the way job scheduling is traditionally done. In this paper, we analyze the relation between the TS and the SS systems in a non-dedicated cluster. As a consequence of this analysis, we propose a new SS technique, termed 3DBackfilling. This proposal is applied to an environment with multiple concurrent execution of distributed applications. Besides, our technique considers the requirements of the local workload running on each node. 3DBackfilling was evaluated in a non-dedicated PVM/MPI Linux cluster, and it was compared with traditional SS policies.