Fault-aware, utility-based job scheduling on Blue Gene/P systems

Abstract—Job scheduling on large-scale systems is an in-creasingly complicated affair, with numerous factors influencing scheduling policy. Addressing these concerns results in sophisti-cated scheduling policies that can be difficult to reason about. In this paper, we present a general utility-based scheduling frame-work to balance various scheduling requirements and priorities. It enables system owners to customize scheduling policies under different circumstances without changing the scheduling code. We also develop a fault-aware job allocation strategy for Blue Gene/P systems to address the increasing concern of system failures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these facilities by means of event-driven simulations with real job traces collected from the production Blue Gene/P system at Argonne National Laboratory. I