CRAM: A Congestion-Aware Resource and Allocation Manager for Data-Intensive High-Performance Computing

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

This project will develop a job scheduling and resource allocation system for data-intensive high-performance computing (HPC) based on the congestion pricing of a systems' heterogeneous resources. This extends the concept of resource management beyond processing: it allocates memory, disk I/O, and the network among jobs. The research will overcome the critical shortcomings of processor-centric resource management, which wastes huge portions of cluster and supercomputer resources for data-intensive workloads, e.g. I/O bandwidth governs the performance of many modern HPC applications but, at present, it is neither allocated nor managed. The research will develop techniques that (1) reconfigure the degree of parallelism of HPC jobs to avoid congestion and wastage, (2) support lower-priority, allocation elastic jobs that can be scheduled on arbitrary numbers of nodes to consume unallocated resource fragments, and (3) co-schedule batch-processing workloads that use system resources that are unoccupied due to asymmetric utilization and temporal shifts in the foreground jobs. These techniques will be implemented and supported for free public use as extensions to an open-source resource-management framework. If used broadly, the software has the potential to provide much better utilization of the national investment in HPC facilities.