Exploiting fine-grained idle periods in networks of workstations
| Title | Exploiting fine-grained idle periods in networks of workstations |
| Publication Type | Journal Articles |
| Year of Publication | 2000 |
| Authors | Ryu K D, Hollingsworth J |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pagination | 683 - 698 |
| Date Published | 2000/07// |
| ISBN Number | 1045-9219 |
| Keywords | cluster of workstations, Computer networks, Concurrent computing, Contracts, Delay, fine-grained availability, Intelligent networks, Linger-Longer, networks of workstations, PARALLEL PROCESSING, Predictive models, Processor scheduling, Resumes, scheduling policy, Throughput, workload characterization, workstation clusters, Workstations |
| Abstract | Studies have shown that for a significant fraction of the time, workstations are idle. In this paper, we present a new scheduling policy called Linger-Longer that exploits the fine-grained availability of workstations to run sequential and parallel jobs. We present a two-level workload characterization study and use it to simulate a cluster of workstations running our new policy. We compare two variations of our policy to two previous policies: Immediate-Eviction and Pause-and-Migrate. Our study shows that the Linger-Longer policy can improve the throughput of foreign jobs on a cluster by 60 percent with only a 0.5 percent slowdown of local jobs. For parallel computing, we show that the Linger-Longer policy outperforms reconfiguration strategies when the processor utilization by the local process is 20 percent or less in both synthetic bulk synchronous and real data-parallel applications |
| DOI | 10.1109/71.877793 |