Characterization of Bandwidth-aware Meta-schedulers for Co-allocating Jobs in a Mini-grid∗

In this paper, we present a bandwidth-centric job communication model that captures the interaction and impact of simultaneously co-allocated jobs in a grid. We compare our dynamic model with previous research that utilizes a fixed execution time penalty for co-allocated jobs. We explore the interaction of simultaneously co-allocated jobs and the contention they often create in the network infrastructure of a dedicated computational grid. We also present several bandwidth-aware co-allocating meta-schedulers. These schedulers take inter-cluster network utilization into account as a means by which to mitigate degraded job run-time performance. We make use of a bandwidth-centric parallel job communication model that captures the time-varying utilization of shared inter-cluster network resources. By doing so, we are able to evaluate the performance of grid scheduling algorithms that focus not only on node resource allocation, but also on shared intercluster network bandwidth.