A taxonomy of application scheduling tools for high performance cluster computing

Application scheduling plays an important role in high-performance cluster computing. Application scheduling can be classified as job scheduling and task scheduling. This paper presents a survey on the software tools for the graph-based scheduling on cluster systems with the focus on task scheduling. The tasks of a parallel or distributed application can be properly scheduled onto multi-processors in order to optimize the performance of the program (e.g., execution time or resource utilization). In general, scheduling algorithms are designed based on the notion of task graph that represents the relationship of parallel tasks. The scheduling algorithms map the nodes of a graph to the processors in order to minimize overall execution time. Although many scheduling algorithms have been proposed in the literature, surprisingly not many practical tools can be found in practical use. After discussing the fundamental scheduling techniques, we propose a framework and taxonomy for the scheduling tools on clusters. Using this framework, the features of existing scheduling tools are analyzed and compared. We also discuss the important issues in improving the usability of the scheduling tools. This work is supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University under grant H-ZJ80 and by NASA Ames Research Center by a cooperative grant agreement with the University of Texas at Arlington. Jiannong Cao received the BSc degree in computer science from Nanjing University, Nanjing, China in 1982, and the MSc and the Ph.D degrees in computer science from Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA, in 1986 and 1990 respectively. He is currently an associate professor in Department of Computing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. He is also the director of the Internet and Mobile Computing Lab in the department. He was on the faculty of computer science at James Cook University and University of Adelaide in Australia, and City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, networking, mobile computing, fault tolerance, and distributed software architecture and tools. He has published over 120 technical papers in the above areas. He has served as a member of editorial boards of several international journals, a reviewer for international journals/conference proceedings, and also as an organizing/programme committee member for many international conferences. Dr. Cao is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Communication Society, IEEE, and ACM. He is also a member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing, IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing, IEEE Technical Committee on Fault Tolerant Computing, and Computer Architecture Professional Committee of the China Computer Federation. Alvin Chan is currently an assistant professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He graduated from the University of New South Wales with a Ph.D. degree in 1995 and was subsequently employed as a Research Scientist by the CSIRO, Australia. From 1997 to 1998, he was employed by the Centre for Wireless Communications, National University of Singapore as a Program Manager. Dr. Chan is one of the founding members and director of a university spin-off company, Information Access Technology Limited. He is an active consultant and has been providing consultancy services to both local and overseas companies. His research interests include mobile computing, context-aware computing and smart card applications. Yudong Sun received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He received Ph.D. degree from the University of Hong Kong in 2002, all in computer science. From 1988 to 1996, he was among the teaching staff in Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. From 2002 to 2003, he held a research position at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. At present, he is a Research Associate in School of Computing Science at University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, Web services, Grid computing, and bioinformatics. Sajal K. Das is currently a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN) at the University of Texas at Arlington. His current research interests include resource and mobility management in wireless networks, mobile and pervasive computing, sensor networks, mobile internet, parallel processing, and grid computing. He has published over 250 research papers, and holds four US patents in wireless mobile networks. He received the Best Paper Awards in ACM MobiCom’99, ICOIN-16, ACM, MSWiM’00 and ACM/IEEE PADS’97. Dr. Das serves on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, ACM/Kluwer Wireless Networks, Parallel Processing Letters, Journal of Parallel Algorithms and Applications. He served as General Chair of IEEE PerCom’04, IWDC’04, MASCOTS’02 ACM WoWMoM’00-02; General Vice Chair of IEEE PerCom’03, ACM MobiCom’00 and IEEE HiPC’00-01; Program Chair of IWDC’02, WoWMoM’98-99; TPC Vice Chair of ICPADS’02; and as TPC member of numerous IEEE and ACM conferences. Minyi Guo received his Ph.D. degree in information science from University of Tsukuba, Japan in 1998. From 1998 to 2000, Dr. Guo had been a research scientist of NEC Soft, Ltd. Japan. He is currently a professor at the Department of Computer Software, The University of Aizu, Japan. From 2001 to 2003, he was a visiting professor of Georgia State University, USA, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. Dr. Guo has served as general chair, program committee or organizing committee chair for many international conferences, and delivered more than 20 invited talks in USA, Australia, China, and Japan. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Embedded Systems. He is also in editorial board of International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, Journal of Embedded Computing, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Scientific and Engineering Computing, and International Journal of Computer and Applications. Dr. Guo’s research interests include parallel and distributed processing, parallelizing compilers, data parallel languages, data mining, molecular computing and software engineering. He is a member of the ACM, IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and IEICE. He is listed in Marquis Who’s Who in Science and Engineering.