The performance of a parallel TSP program and byte sequential benchmarks executing on a shared cluster

Although individual PCs of a cluster are used by their owners to run sequential applications (local jobs), the cluster as a whole or its subset can also be employed to run parallel applications (cluster jobs) even during working hours. This implies that these computers have to be shared by parallel and sequential applications, which could lead to the improvement of the execution performance and resource utilization. However, there is a lack of experimental study showing the behavior and performance of executing parallel and sequential applications concurrently on a non-dedicated cluster. The result of such research would be beneficial for the development of new global scheduling algorithms. We present the result of an experimental study into scheduling of a mixture of parallel and sequential applications on a non-dedicated cluster. The aim of this study is to learn how the concurrent execution of a communication intensive parallel application and sequential applications influences their execution performance and utilization of the cluster.