Workshops Archive

Evaluating HPC Scheduling Strategies for Urgent Workloads

Workshop: 6th Combined Workshop on Interactive and Urgent High Performance Computing

Authors: Ketan Maheshwari (Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)); Anderson Borch (Colorado State University); and Jordan Webb, Brian Etz, Ross Miller, Frédéric Suter, Sarp Oral, and Rafael Ferreira da Silva (Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL))

Abstract: Scientific computing centers increasingly face workloads with diverse urgency requirements, driven by applications that demand rapid or even immediate execution. Appropriately configured scheduling policies can significantly improve both user satisfaction and overall cluster utilization. In this work, we present a systematic analysis of scheduler configurations under scenarios where a fraction of jobs have urgent computing needs. We evaluate multiple job scheduling simulators, develop a lightweight job-submission emulation framework, and create tools to analyze and visualize the resulting scheduling data. Our study identifies key trade-offs between responsiveness, fairness, and efficiency, and offers a set of practical scheduling configurations (particularly for Slurm) that can be tailored to HPC environments supporting mixed-urgency workloads.

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