Extending Proportional-Share Scheduling to a Network of Workstation

As networks of workstations (NOW) emerge as a viable platform for a wide range of workloads, a new scheduling approach is needed to allocate the collection of resources across competing users. In this paper, we show that extensions to a proportional-share scheduler for improving response time can still fairly allocate resources to a mix of sequential, interactive, and parallel jobs in this distributed environment. We find that a proportional-share scheduler, specifically a stride-scheduler, running on each node in the cluster is a good building-block. Simple extensions are implemented and analyzed which provide better response-times for interactive jobs by giving those jobs their share of resources over a longer time-interval. When scheduling jobs across the cluster, we show that fairness can be guaranteed if each local scheduler knows the number of tickets issued to each user and if the tickets are balanced across all workstations. Finally, we show that a proportional-share of resources can be provided to timeshared parallel applications through a combination of stridescheduling and implicit coscheduling.