Chapter 14: Cluster Workload Management

Overview

James Patton Jones, David Lifka, Bill Nitzberg, and Todd Tannenbaum

A Beowulf cluster is a powerful (and attractive) tool. But managing the workload can present significant challenges. It is not uncommon to run hundreds or thousands of jobs or to share the cluster among many users. Some jobs may run only on certain nodes because not all the nodes in the cluster are identical; for instance, some nodes have more memory than others. Some nodes temporarily may not be functioning correctly. Certain users may require priority access to part or all of the cluster. Certain jobs may have to be run at certain times of the day or only after other jobs have completed. Even in the simplest environment, keeping track of all these activities and resource specifics while managing the ever-increasing web of priorities is a complex problem. Workload management software attacks this problem by providing a way to monitor and manage the flow of work through the system, allowing the best use of cluster resources as defined by a supplied policy.

Basically, workload management software maximizes the delivery of resources to jobs, given competing user requirements and local policy restrictions. Users package their work into sets of jobs, while the administrator (or system owner) describes local use policies (e.g., Tom's jobs always go first). The software monitors the state of the cluster, schedules work, enforces policy, and tracks usage.

A quick note on terminology: Many terms have been used to describe this area of management software. All of the following topics are related to workload management: distributed resource management, batch queuing, job scheduling, and resource and task scheduling.