Evaluation of Task Assignment Policies for Supercomputing Servers: The Case for Load Unbalancing and Fairness

While the MPP is still the most common architecture in supercomputer centers today, a simpler and cheaper machine configuration is growing increasingly common. This alternative setup may be described simply as a collection of multiprocessors or a distributed server system. This collection of multiprocessors is fed by a single common stream of jobs, where each job is dispatched to exactly one of the multiprocessor machines for processing. The biggest question which arises in such distributed server systems is what is a good policy for assigning jobs to host machines. Many task assignment policies have been proposed, but not systematically evaluated under supercomputing workloads. In this paper we start by comparing existing task assignment policies using a trace-driven simulation under supercomputing workloads. We use analysis to validate our results and to provide intuition. We find that while the performance of supercomputing servers varies widely with the task assignment policy, n...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Bianca Schroeder, Mor Harchol-Balter
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Distributed Server Systems, HPDC 2000, Many Task Assignment, Task Assignment Policies