Resilient Application Co-scheduling with Processor Redistribution

Abstract

Recently, the benefits of co-scheduling several applications have been demonstrated in a fault-free context, both in terms of performance and energy savings. However, large-scale computer systems are confronted to frequent failures, and resilience techniques must be employed to ensure the completion of large applications. Indeed, failures may create severe imbalance between applications, and significantly degrade performance. In this paper, we propose to redistribute the resources assigned to each application upon the striking of failures, in order to minimize the expected completion time of a set of co-scheduled applications. First, we introduce a formal model and establish complexity results. When no redistribution is allowed, we can minimize the expected completion time in polynomial time, while the problem becomes NP-complete with redistributions, even in a fault-free context. Therefore, we design polynomial-time heuristics that perform redistributions and account for processor failures. A fault simulator is used to perform extensive simulations that demonstrate the usefulness of redistribution and the performance of the proposed heuristics.