Dominant Fairness Fairness: Hierarchical Scheduling for Multiple Resources in Heterogeneous Datacenters

Hierarchical scheduling for multiple resources is partially responsible for the performance achievements in large scale datacenters. However, the latest scheduling technique, Hierarchy Dominant Resource Fairness (H-DRF)[1], has some shortcomings in heterogeneous environments, such as starving certain jobs or unfair resource allocation. This is because a heterogeneous environment brings new challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel scheduling algorithm called Dominant Fairness Fairness (DFF). DFF tries to keep resource allocation fair, avoid job starvation, and improve system resource utilization. We implement DFF in the YARN system, a most commonly used scheduler for large scale clusters. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm leads to higher resource utilization and better throughput than H-DRF.