Processor Allocation Policies for Message-Passing Parallel Computers

When multiple jobs compete for processing resources on a parallel computer, the operating system kernel's processor allocation policy determines how many and which processors to allocate to each. This dissertation investigates the issues involved in constructing a processor allocation policy for large scale, message-passing parallel computers supporting a scientific workload. First, the issues that affect the performance of scheduling policies for message-passing parallel systems are examined. We argue that reasonable policies must provide nearly equal resource allocation to all runnable jobs and allocate, to a single job, processors that are in close proximity to one another. Second, the concept of efficiency preservation is defined as a characteristic of processor allocation policie..