An efficient resource allocation scheme for gang scheduling

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 alleviate 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 of re-packing jobs, running jobs in multiple slots and minimising time slots into the buddy allocation system to significantly improve the system and job performance. Because there is no process migration involved in job re-packing, this scheme is particularly suitable for clustered parallel computing systems.