An efficient resource allocation scheme for gang scheduling

194. B. B. Zhou, P. Mackerras, C. W. Johnson, D. Walsh and R. P. Brent, An efficient resource allocation scheme for gang scheduling, Proc. IEEE International Workshop on Cluster Computing (Melbourne, 1999), 187-194.

Paper: pdf (106K), ps (171K).

Abstract

Gang scheduling is currently the most popular scheduling scheme for parallel processing in a time shared environment.  One major drawback of using gang scheduling is the problem of fragmentation.  The conventional method to allieviate this problem is to allow jobs running in multiple time slots.  However,  our experimental results show that simply applying this method alone cannot solve the problem of fragmentation, but on the contrary it may eventually degrade the efficiency of system resource utilisation.  In this paper we introduce an efficient resource allocation scheme which effectively incorporates the ideas or re-packing jobs, running jobs in multiple slots and minimising time slots into the buddy based system to significantly improve the system and job performance for gang scheduling.  Because there is no process migration involved in job re-packaging, this scheme is particularly suitable for clustered parallel computing systems.

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Related papers are [169, 180, 181, 189, 192, 198, 202].

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