Towards scheduling evolving applications

Abstract

Most high-performance computing resource managers only allow applications to request a static allocation of resources. However, evolving applications have resource requirements which change (evolve) during their execution. Currently, such applications are forced to make an allocation based on their peak resource requirements, which leads to an inefficient resource usage. This paper studies whether it makes sense for resource managers to support evolving applications. It focuses on scheduling fully-predictably evolving applications on homogeneous resources, for which it proposes several algorithms and evaluates them based on simulations. Results show that resource usage and application response time can be significantly improved with short scheduling times. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.