Date of Award

2009

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.Sc.

Department

Computer Science

Keywords

Applied sciences

Supervisor

Angela C. Sodan

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

Parallel jobs have different runtimes and numbers of threads/processes. Thus, scheduling parallel jobs involves a packing problem. If jobs are packed as tightly as possible, utilization will be improved. Otherwise, some resources have to stay idle. The common solution to deal with idle resources is backfilling, which schedule smaller jobs submitted later to execute earlier as long as they do not postpone the first job or all the previous jobs in the waiting queue. Traditionally, backfilling uses first fit for idle resources, according to the submission order. However, in this case, better packing of jobs could be missed. Hence, we propose an algorithm which looks further ahead if significantly improving utilization. However at the same time, this could be unfair to some jobs ahead in the queue. So we use a delay factor as a constraint to limit unfairness. We propose a branch and bound algorithm which selects jobs for backfilling which keep utilization high, while trying to stay close to First-Come-First-Served (FCFS). We evaluate relative response time and utilization and compare to other backfilling approaches. The selection of jobs for backfilling to optimize for high utilization and low delay is implemented as an extension of the existing Scojo-PECT preemptive scheduler.

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