Linger Longer: Fine-Grain Cycle Stealing for Networks of Workstations
K.D. Ryu and J.K. Hollingsworth
SC' 98 (Orlando, FL-Nov. 1998)
Studies have shown that a significant fraction of the time,
workstations are idle. In this paper we present a new scheduling policy
called Linger-Longer that exploits the fine-grained availability of
workstations to run sequential and parallel jobs. We present a
two-level workload characteriza-tion study and use it to simulate a
cluster of workstations running our new policy. We compare two
variations of our policy to two previous policies: Immediate-Eviction
and Pause-and-Migrate. Our study shows that the Linger-Longer policy
can improve the throughput of foreign jobs on cluster by 60% with only
a 0.5% slowdown of foreground jobs.