Scheduling Many-Task Workloads on Supercomputers: Dealing with Trailing Tasks Timothy G. Armstrong, Zhao Zhang Daniel S. Katz, Michael Wilde, Ian T. Foster Department of Computer Science Computation Institute University of Chicago University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory
[email protected],
[email protected] [email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract—In order for many-task applications to be attrac- as a worker and allocate one task per node. If tasks are tive candidates for running on high-end supercomputers, they single-threaded, each core or virtual thread can be treated must be able to benefit from the additional compute, I/O, as a worker. and communication performance provided by high-end HPC hardware relative to clusters, grids, or clouds. Typically this The second feature of many-task applications is an empha- means that the application should use the HPC resource in sis on high performance. The many tasks that make up the such a way that it can reduce time to solution beyond what application effectively collaborate to produce some result, is possible otherwise. Furthermore, it is necessary to make and in many cases it is important to get the results quickly. efficient use of the computational resources, achieving high This feature motivates the development of techniques to levels of utilization. Satisfying these twin goals is not trivial, because while the efficiently run many-task applications on HPC hardware. It parallelism in many task computations can vary over time, allows people to design and develop performance-critical on many large machines the allocation policy requires that applications in a many-task style and enables the scaling worker CPUs be provisioned and also relinquished in large up of existing many-task applications to run on much larger blocks rather than individually.