Fair Scheduling of General-Purpose Workloads on Workstation Clusters

In this paper we present a scheduling strategy for workstation clusters able to effectively and fairly schedule general-purpose workloads potentially made up by compute-bound, interactive, and I/O-intensive applications, that may each be sequential, client-server, or parallel. The scheduling strategy allocates resources to processes of the same parallel applications in such a way that they all get the same CPU share regardless of the level of resource contention on the respective machines, and relies on an extended stride scheduler to fairly allocate individual workstations. A simulation analysis carried out for a variety of workloads and operational conditions shows that our strategy (a) delivers good performance to all the applications classes composing general-purpose workloads, (b) fairly allocates resources among competing applications, and (c) outperforms alternative strategies.