Publications

R. Kettimuthu, V. Subramani, S. Srinivasan, T. Gopalsamy, D. K. Panda, and P. Sadayappan, "Selective Preemption Strategies for Parallel Job Scheduling," Preprint ANL/MCS-P1209-1204, December 2004. [pdf]

Although theoretical results have been established regarding the utility of preemptive scheduling in reducing average job turnaround time, job suspension/restart is not much used in practice at supercomputer centers for parallel job scheduling. A number of questions remain unanswered regarding the practical utility of preemptive scheduling. We explore this issue through a simulation-based study, using real job logs from supercomputer centers. We develop a tunable selective-suspension strategy and demonstrate its effectiveness. We also present new insights into the effect of preemptive scheduling on different job classes and deal with the impact of suspensions on worst-case response time. Further, we analyze the performance of the proposed schemes under different load conditions.