Time sharing massively parallel machines. Draft

As part of the Massively Parallel Computing Initiative (MPCI) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the authors have developed a simple, effective and portable time sharing mechanism by scheduling gangs of processes on tightly coupled parallel machines. By time-sharing the resources, the system interleaves production and interactive jobs. Immediate priority is given to interactive use, maintaining good response time. Production jobs are scheduled during idle periods, making use of the otherwise unused resources. In this paper the authors discuss their experience with gang scheduling over the 3 year life-time of the project. In section 2, they motivate the project and discuss some of its details. Section 3.0 describes the general scheduling problem and how gang scheduling addresses it. In section 4.0, they describe the implementation. Section 8.0 presents results culled over the lifetime of the project. They conclude this paper with some observations and possible future directions