PROC: process reordering-based coscheduling on workstation clusters

Workstation clusters are emerging as a platform for the execution of general-purpose workloads. To use clusters as shared computing servers, scheduling techniques able to effectively handle workloads with diverse characteristics on demands, are required. Implicit coscheduling is known to be an effective technique to improve the performance of parallel workloads in time-sharing clusters. However, implicit coscheduling still does not take into consideration the system behavior like load imbalance that affects cluster utilization. In this paper, we propose the use of global information to enhance the existing implicit coscheduling schemes. We also introduce a novel coscheduling approach based on process reordering exploiting global load imbalance information to coordinate communicating processes. The results obtained from a detailed simulation study show that our approach significantly decreases the average job response time (by up to 21.4%) by reducing the idle time (by up to 55.6%) and spin time (by up to 31.8%) caused by the load imbalance.