Boosting Performance for I/O-Intensive Workload by Preemptive Job Migrations in a Cluster System. Xiao Qin, Hong Jiang, Yifeng Zhu, and David R. Swanson. In Proceedings of the 15th IEEE Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing, Nov. 10-12, 2003, Brazil.


Abstract
Load balancing in a cluster system has been investigated extensively, mainly focusing on the effective usage of global CPU and memory resources. However, if a significant portion of applications running in the system is I/O-intensive, traditional load balancing policies that focus on CPU and memory usage may cause the system performance to decrease substantially. To solve this problem, a new I/O-aware load-balancing scheme with preemptive job migration is presented to sustain the high performance of a cluster with a diverse set of workload conditions. The proposed scheme dynamically detects I/O load imbalance on nodes of a cluster, and determines whether to preempt some running jobs on overloaded nodes and migrate them to other less- or under-loaded nodes. Besides balancing I/O load, the scheme takes into account both CPU and memory load sharing in clusters, thereby maintaining the same level of performance as existing schemes when I/O load is low or well balanced. Results from a trace-driven simulation show that, compared to the existing approaches that only consider I/O with non-preemptive job migrations, the proposed schemes achieve the improvement in mean slowdown by up to a factor of 10.

BibTeX Entry
  @inproceedings{yzhu:scahpc03,
author = "Xiao Qin and Hong Jiang and Yifeng Zhu and David Swanson",
title = "Boosting Performance for {I/O}-Intensive Workload by Preemptive Job Migrations in a Cluster System",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 15th IEEE Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing",
location = "Brazil",
year = "2003",
month = nov
}

Full Paper
 
Last modified on October 16, 2003