SC Conference - Activity Details

Alvin AuYoung  (University of California, San Diego)

Amin Vahdat  (University of California, San Diego)

Alex Snoeren  (University of California, San Diego)

Grid Scheduling

Wednesday,  01:30PM - 02:00PM

Room PB256

Proponents of utility-based scheduling policies have shown the potential for a 100-1400% increase in value-delivered to users when used in lieu of traditional approaches such as FCFS, backfill or priority queues. However, perhaps due to concerns about their potential fragility, these policies are rarely used in practice. We present an evaluation of a utility-based scheduling policy based upon real workload data from both an auction-based resource infrastructure, and a supercomputing cluster. We model two potential sources of imperfect operating conditions for a utility-based policy: user uncertainty and wealth inequity. Through simulation, we find that in the worst-case, the value delivered by a utility-based policy can degrade to half that of traditional approaches, but that such a policy can provide 20-100% improvement in expected operating conditions. We conclude that future efforts in designing utility-based allocation mechanisms and policies must explicitly consider the fidelity of elicited job value information from users.

The full paper can be found in the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Computer Society