Contiguity and Locality in Backfilling Scheduling
Résumé
We consider the classical First Come First Served /
backfilling algorithm which is commonly used in actual batch
schedulers. As HPC platforms grow in size and complexity,
an interesting question is how to enhance this algorithm in
order to improve global performance by reducing the overall
amount of communications. In this direction, we are interested
in studying the impact of contiguity and locality allocation
constraints on the behavior of batch scheduler. We provide
a theoretical analysis of the cost of enforcing contiguity and
locality properties. More specifically, we show that both properties
do not impose strong limit on achievable makespan
performance while comparing feasible optimal solutions under
different settings; we describe here the existing results on this
topic and complete them with all combinations of constraints.
We also propose a range of different allocation algorithms for
backfilling by choosing between a strict or a soft enforcing
of locality and contiguity. Our approach is validated through
an extensive series of simulations based on batch scheduler
traces. Experiments show that our algorithms do not increase
the makespan in average when comparing to actual practices.
Interestingly, we observe that enforcing contiguity efficiently
improves locality.