Preemptive resource management for dynamically arriving tasks in an oversubscribed heterogeneous computing system

We design resource management heuristics that assign serial tasks to the nodes of a heterogeneous high performance computing (HPC) system. The value of completing these tasks is modeled using monotonically decreasing utility functions that represent the time-varying importance of the task. The value of completing a task is equal to its utility function at the time of its completion. The overall performance of this system is measured using the total utility earned by all tasks during some interval of time. To maximize the performance of such a system where the preemption of tasks is possible, we have designed, analyzed, and compared a set of resource allocation heuristic techniques. We combine two utility-aware heuristics with three different preemption techniques to create six preemption-capable heuristics. We also consider the two utility-aware heuristics without preemption. We use simulation studies to evaluate this set of eight heuristics and compare them with an FCFS heuristic, which is often used in real systems, and random assignments. In general, our set of eight heuristics is able to significantly outperform the comparison heuristics, and the preemption-capable heuristics are able to significantly increase the utility earned compared to the heuristics that do not use preemption. We analyze the performance tradeoffs among the different preemption-capable heuristics under a variety of oversubscribed workload environments.