An Opportunity Cost Approach for Job Assignment and Reassignment in a Scalable Computing Cluster

A new method is presented for job assignment to and reassignment between machines in a computing cluster. Our method is based on a theoretical framework that has been experimentally tested and shown to be useful in practice. This “opportunity cost” method converts the usage of several heterogeneous resources in a machine to a single homogeneous “cost.” Assignment and reassignment is then performed based on that cost. This is in contrast to previous methods for job assignment and reassignment, which treat each resource as an independent entity with its own constraints. These previous methods were intrinsically ad hoc, as there was no clean way to balance one resource against another.