ASETS: A SDN Empowered Task Scheduling System for HPCaaS on the Cloud

Abstract

With increasing demands for High Performance Computing (HPC), new ideas and methods are emerged to utilize computing resources more efficiently. Cloud Computing appears to provide benefits such as resource pooling, broad network access and cost efficiency for the HPC applications. However, moving the HPC applications to the cloud can face several key challenges, primarily, the virtualization overhead, multi-tenancy and network latency. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) as an emerging technology appears to pave the road and provide dynamic manipulation of cloud networking such as topology, routing, and bandwidth allocation. This paper presents a new scheme called ASETS which targets dynamic configuration and monitoring of cloud networking using SDN to improve the performance of HPC applications and in particular task scheduling for HPC as a service on the cloud (HPCaaS). Further, SETSA, (SDN-Empowered Task Scheduler Algorithm) is proposed as a novel task scheduling algorithm for the offered ASETS architecture. SETSA monitors the network bandwidth to take advantage of its changes when submitting tasks to the virtual machines. Empirical analysis of the algorithm in different case scenarios show that SETSA has significant potentials to improve the performance of HPCaaS platforms by increasing the bandwidth efficiency and decreasing task turnaround time. In addition, SETSAW, (SETSA Window) is proposed as an improvement of the SETSA algorithm.