Experiences with parallel job scheduling on a transputer system

Abstract

Both time and space sharing strategies have been proposed for job scheduling in multiprogrammed parallel systems. This paper summarizes the major observations gained from an experimental investigation of these two partition sharing strategies on a Transputer system. A number of factors such as the applications and their software architectures in the multiprogramming mix, the partition sharing strategy, and the partition size are varied and the resulting insights into system performance and scheduling are presented. Space sharing is observed to produce a superior performance in comparison to time sharing for a number of multiprogrammed workloads. Time sharing showed a better performance for workloads with high variability in process execution times, and with high rates of interprocess communication. The relationships between system performance and a number of workload and system characteristics are presented.