Two-level utilization-based processor allocation for scheduling moldable jobs

Most modern parallel programs are written with the moldable property. However, most existing parallel computing systems treat such parallel programs as rigid jobs for scheduling, resulting in two drawbacks. The first is inflexibility and inefficiency in processor allocation, leading to resource fragmentation and thus poor performance. The second is about usage inconvenience, requiring users to figure out the best number of processors for executing a job. As HPC as a service emerges, moldable job scheduling has become an important research issue for achieving both high performance and user convenience. This paper presents our research work on developing new processor allocation approaches for moldable job scheduling based on two-level resource utilization calculation, preemptive job execution, and dual-criteria iterative improvement. A series of simulation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed approaches and compare them to previous methods. The experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvement in terms of average turnaround time.