Preemption Based Backfill

Recent advances in DNA analysis, global climate modeling and computational fluid dynamics have increased the demand for supercomputing resources. Through increasing the efficiency and throughput of existing supercomputing centers, additional computational power can be provided for these applications. Backfill has been shown to increase the efficiency of supercomputer schedulers for large, homogenous machines[3]. Utilizations can still be as low as 60% for machines with heterogeneous resources and strict administrative requirements. Preemption based backfill allows the scheduler to be more aggressive in filling up the schedule for a supercomputer[2]. Utilization can be increased and administrative requirements relaxed if it is possible to preempt a running job to allow a higher priority task to run.