Applications in science and engineering often require huge computational resources for solving problems within a reasonable time frame. Parallel supercomputers provide the computational infrastructure for solving such problems. A traditional application scheduler running on a parallel cluster only supports static scheduling where the number of processors allocated to an application remains fixed throughout the lifetime of execution of the job. Due to the unpredictability in job arrival times and varying resource requirements, static scheduling can result in idle system resources thereby decreasing the overall system throughput. In this paper we present a prototype framework called ReSHAPE, which supports dynamic resizing of parallel MPI applications executed on distributed memory platforms. The framework includes a scheduler that supports resizing of applications, an API to enable applications to interact with the scheduler, and a library that makes resizing viable. Applications executed using the ReSHAPE scheduler framework can expand to take advantage of additional free processors or can shrink to accommodate a high priority application, without getting suspended. In our research, we have mainly focused on structured applications that have two-dimensional data arrays distributed across a two-dimensional processor grid. The resize library includes algorithms for processor selection and processor mapping. Experimental results show that the ReSHAPE framework can improve individual job turn-around time and overall system throughput.
Vadhiyar and Dongarra @cite_13 @cite_8 describe a user-level checkpointing framework called Stop Restart Software (SRS) for developing malleable and migratable applications for distributed and Grid computing systems. The framework implements a rescheduler which monitors application progress and can migrate the application to a better resource. Data redistribution is done via user-level file-based checkpointing.
@cite_13 @cite_8
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The ability to produce malleable parallel applications that can be stopped and reconfigured during the execution can offer attractive benefits for both the system and the applications. The reconfiguration can be in terms of varying the parallelism for the applications, changing the data distributions during the executions or dynamically changing the software components involved in the application execution. In distributed and Grid computing systems, migration and reconfiguration of such malleable applications across distributed heterogeneous sites which do not share common file systems provides flexibility for scheduling and resource management in such distributed environments. The present reconfiguration systems do not support migration of parallel applications to distributed locations. In this paper, we discuss a framework for developing malleable and migratable MPI message-passing parallel applications for distributed systems. The framework includes a user-level checkpointing library called SRS and a runtime support system that manages the checkpointed data for distribution to distributed locations. Our experiments and results indicate that the parallel applications, with instrumentation to SRS library, were able to achieve reconfigurability incurring about 15-35 overhead. At least three factors in the existing migration frameworks make them less suitable in Grid systems especially when the goal is to improve the response times for individual applications. These factors are the separate policies for suspension and migration of executing applications employed by these migration frameworks, the use of pre-defined conditions for suspension and migration and the lack of knowledge of the remaining execution time of the applications. In this paper we describe a migration framework for performance oriented Grid systems that implements tightly coupled policies for both suspension and migration of executing applications and takes into account both system load and application characteristics. The main goal of our migration framework is to improve the response times for individual applications. We also present some results that demonstrate the usefulness of our migration framework.