AGENDA

Enabling Interactive Jobs in Virtualized Data Centers

John Paul Walters, Bhagyashree Bantwal, Vipin Chaudhary

Abstract: Existing batch schedulers are incapable of adequately addressing the need for immediate access to resources for interactive jobs. In this paper we describe our virtual machine-centric scheduler, UBIS, that facilitates both high priority interactive jobs and traditional batch jobs. UBIS is based on preemptable job scheduling to enable rapid resource provisioning for interactive jobs and easy job restarts for preempted jobs. Using simulation we characterize the impact of interactivity on the data center and develop a novel set of scheduling criteria that emphasizes near-immediate resource allocation for interactive jobs. We show that our new scheduling criteria not only improves resource allocation for interactive jobs, but also improves resource utilization and response times for batch jobs up to 500%. Our system will serve as a valuable tool to enable interactive jobs to execute efficiently within a traditional batch scheduling environment.