Non-clairvoyant online scheduling of synchronized jobs on virtual clusters

Abstract

Although virtualization technology is recently applied to next-generation distributed high-performance computing systems, theoretical aspects of scheduling jobs on these virtualized environments are not sufficiently studied, especially in online and non-clairvoyant cases. Virtualization of computing resources results in interference and virtualization overheads that negatively impact the load balancing objectives on commonly used cluster of multi-core physical machines. We present a technique for non-clairvoyant online scheduling of globally synchronized jobs, each of which spawns tasks to execute compute-intensive works. Our technique considers both load balancing of physical cores and per job synchronization cost minimization. We show that in the presence of arbitrary virtualization overheads, interference effects and synchronization cost, the problem can be reduced to an online unrelated parallel machine scheduling, which is solved using routing of virtual circuits. We present a new opportunity cost model to reduce the problem to the routing of virtual circuits and prove the effectiveness of our scheduling technique using mathematical analysis and simulative experiments.