Towards convergence in job schedulers for parallel supercomputers

Abstract. The space of job schedulers for parallel supercomputers is rather fragmented, because dierent researchers tend to make dierent assumptions about the goals of the scheduler, the information that is available about the workload, and the operations that the scheduler may perform. We argue that by identifying these assumptions explicitly, it is possible to reach a level of convergence. For example, it is possible to unite most of the dierent assumptions into a common framework by associating a suitable cost function with the execution of each job. The cost function re ects knowledge about the job and the degree to which it ts the goals of the system. Given such cost functions, scheduling is done to maximize the system's prot.