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15th Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD'03)   p. 235
Boosting Performance for I/O-Intensive Workload by Preemptive Job Migrations in a Cluster System
Xiao Qin, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Hong Jiang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Yifeng Zhu, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
David R. Swanson, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/CAHPC.2003.1250343
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Abstract
Load balancing in a cluster system has been investigated extensively, mainly focusing on the effective usage of global CPU and memory resources. However, if a significant portion of applications running in the system is I/O-intensive, traditional load balancing policies that focus on CPU and memory usage may cause the system performance to decrease substantially. To solve this problem, a new I/O-aware load-balancing scheme with preemptive job migration is presented to sustain the high performance of a cluster with a diverse set of workload conditions. The proposed scheme dynamically detects I/O load imbalance on nodes of a cluster, and determines whether to preempt some running jobs on over-loaded nodes and migrate them to other less- or under-loaded nodes. Besides balancing I/O load, the scheme takes into account both CPU and memory load sharing in clusters, thereby maintaining the same level of performance as existing schemes when I/O load is low or well balanced. Results from a trace-driven simulation show that, compared to the existing approaches that only consider I/O with non-preemptive job migrations, the proposed schemes achieve the improvement in mean slowdown by up to a factor of 10.
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Citation:  Xiao Qin, Hong Jiang, Yifeng Zhu, David R. Swanson, "Boosting Performance for I/O-Intensive Workload by Preemptive Job Migrations in a Cluster System," sbac-pad, p. 235,  15th Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD'03),  2003