Practical Heterogeneous Placeholder Scheduling in Overlay Metacomputers: Early Experiences

Abstract

A practical problem faced by users of high-performance computers is: How can I automatically load balance my jobs across different batchq ueues, whichare in di.erent administrative domains, if there is no existing grid infrastructure? It is common to have user accounts for a number of individual high-performance systems (e.g., departmental, university, regional) that are administered by different groups. Without an administration-deployed grid infrastructure, one can still create a purely user-level aggregation of individual computing systems. The Trellis Project is developing the techniques and tools to take advantage of a user-level overlay metacomputer. Because placeholder scheduling does not require superuser permissions to set up or configure, it is well-suited to overlay metacomputers. This paper contributes to the practical side of grid and metacomputing by empirically demonstrating that placeholder scheduling can work across different administrative domains, across different local schedulers (i.e., PBS and Sun Grid Engine), and across different programming models (i.e., Pthreads, MPI, and sequential). We also describe a new metaqueue system to manage jobs with explicit workflow dependencies.