Hi all. I'm currently assessing different job scheduling technologies for a sizeable compute/HPC project I'm working on.
One of the things various vendors seem to always throw out there as a "value add" in their respective scheduler is their ability to "drive up utilisation" of the HPC cluster environment with some kind of advanced scheduling mechanisms. Pretty much all the big guys seem to bang on about this kind of thing. Moab talk it up, Platform LSM talk about it and say it's something quite special. I don't hear Altair/PBS Pro say much about it, nor do I hear it really made reference to in the OGE/SGE circles however. So – I guess what I'm after is some reality. Are there some kind of highly engineered/premium bits of proprietary code in what companies/schedulers like Moab and Platform LSF (IBM) offer that can't be achieved in the SGE/OGE "free" products? The general intention is that you are always running your HPC environment at full tilt, such that you aren't left with compute nodes being underutilised/if the HPC environment is idle or under low load, it gives the users who do need it maximum ability to maximise their compute performance, but if it's busy, it will scale back appropriately (almost dynamically) such that SLA's are adhered to. I heard the words "Goal driven SLA sensitive workload scheduling". I thought that sounded like some lovely marketing speak, but I will try not to be cynical about it. Thoughts? I'd like to know if people are doing similar things with SGE/OGE – and whether or not truly dynamic load smoothing or some form of smarter mechanisms of workload dispersion are being implemented elsewhere. I.e – is this just a case of having a "load" complex written that can then somehow dynamically adjust the number of jobs a user is allowed to schedule, and then if others want to load up a lot of slots with jobs too, fairshare kicks in and pauses other people's jobs contextually? Thanks. --JC
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