Time-Sharing Parallel Applications with Performance Isolation and Control (26116)

The inventors have developed a system for time-sharing parallel machines that provides isolation and enables the execution rate of an application to be tightly controlled.

Most parallel machines, such as clusters, are space-shared in order to isolate batch parallel applications from each other and maximize their performance. However, this leads to low utilization or potentially long waiting times. Furthermore, the administrator of the parallel machine can only control the admittance of applications, not their execution rate once admitted.

The invention takes as input a target execution rate for each application and continuously adjusts the per-node periodic real-time constraints to achieve those rates with proportional CPU utilization. Advantages are as follows:

Provides performance isolation within a time-sharing framework Improves efficiency through time-sharing capability Allows administrator control over execution rates of parallel applications For further details, see www.cs.northwestern.edu/~blin/paper/NWU-EECS-06-10.pdf.

APPLICATIONS: Cluster computing; Queuing systems for clusters and parallel computers; Grid Computing

STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT: Prototype software has been demonstrated using bulk-synchronous-parallel (BSP) applications. Demonstrations have utilized the “VSched” tool as the local scheduler at each node in conjunction with a centralized implementation of a control algorithm.

Inventor(s): Peter Dinda, Bin Lin, Ananth Sundararaj

Type of Offer: Licensing



« More Computer Science Patents
« More Internet Patents

---