Boosting Performance for I/O-Intensive Workload by Preemptive Job Migrations in a Cluster System

Load balancing in a cluster system has been investigated extensively, mainly focusing on the effective usage of global CPU and memory resources. However, if a significant portion of applications running in the system is I/O-intensive, traditional load balancing policies that focus on CPU and memory usage may cause the system performance to decrease substantially. To solve this problem, a new I/O-aware load-balancing scheme with preemptive job migration is presented to sustain the high performance of a cluster with a diverse set of workload conditions. The proposed scheme dynamically detects I/O load imbalance on nodes of a cluster, and determines whether to preempt some running jobs on overloaded nodes and migrate them to other less- or under-loaded nodes. Besides balancing I/O load, the scheme takes into account both CPU and memory load sharing in clusters, thereby maintaining the same level of performance as existing schemes when I/O load is low or well balanced. Results from a trac...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: sbacpad
• Authors: Xiao Qin, Hong Jiang, Yifeng Zhu, David R. Swanson
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, Hardware, I/O Load, Load Balancing, Load Balancing Policies, SBACPAD 2003