Object Placement Using Performance Surfaces

Heterogeneous parallel clusters of workstations are being used to solve many important computational problems. Scheduling parallel applications on the best collection of machines in a heterogeneous computing environment is a complex problem. Performance prediction is vital to good application performance in this environment since utilization of an ill-suited machine can slow the computation down significantly. This paper addresses the problem of network performance prediction. A new methodology for characterizing network links and application's need for network resources is developed which makes use of Performance Surfaces 3]. This Performance Surface abstraction is used to schedule a parallel application on resources where it will run most efficiently.