From Scheduling Theory to Practice: A Case Study
Ghislain Charrier
University of Lyon. LIP Laboratory
UMR CNRS - ENS Lyon - INRIA
46 allée d’Italie
69364 Lyon Cedex 07, FRANCE
ghislain.charrier@ens-lyon.fr
ABSTRACT
This paper presents the subject of my Ph.D by develop-
ing a case study about scheduling heuristics for the Ocean-
Atmosphere application. Heuristics have been proposed and
validated by performing simulations and real experiments on
the grid. Possible future work revolving around scheduling
over the grid is also presented.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.2 [Computer Applications]: Physical Science And En-
gineering—Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
General Terms
Experimentations, Performances
Keywords
Scheduling, Climate Prediction, Grid Computing
1. INTRODUCTION
Grid infrastructures and middlewares are becoming ma-
ture. However, a lot of open research interests are still
present. Scheduling is one of the very active research areas
in the grid domain. In order to provide efficient execution of
computing intensive applications, scheduling is a necessity.
The main topic of my Ph.D. is going from theoretical to
pratcical scheduling over the grid. To attain this goal, I
studied an application to predict the climate evolution for
the years to come and proposed an appropriate scheduling
heuristic to execute it over the grid.
In this paper, I will present a case study of scheduling for
a climate prediction application called Ocean-Atmosphere.
First, I will describe the application, then the heuristic pre-
sented and the experimental results obtained in Section 2.
Then I will present possible future works for my Ph.D in
Section 3 before concluding in Section 4.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific
permission and/or a fee.
CSTST 2008 October 27-31, 2008, Cergy-Pontoise, France
Copyright 2008 ACM 978-1-60558-046-3/08/0003 ...$5.00.
- 581 -
2. CASE STUDY
It is well known that the world’s climate is changing. One
of the main reasons of this change is the increase of green-
house gases in the atmosphere. In order to predict the cli-
mate evolution, climatologists need to perform simulations.
Cerfacs is a research organization that aims at develop-
ing new algorithms and new simulations methods for large
scientific problems requiring access to enormous computa-
tional resources. Cerfacs work on different areas such as
parallel algorithms, aerodynamics, combustion, data assim-
ilation, electromagnetism, climate and environment.
Ocean-Atmosphere is an application developed by Cer-
facs. This software performs simulations to predict the cli-
mate evolution for the years to come. Choosing the initial
parameters of a simulation is hard, so several simulations
are executed concurrently with different initializations.
The computations need of these simulations is enormous.
The use of a grid seems to be a good way to execute this kind
of applications. Even if the simulations can be performed in
parallel, the time spend to obtain the results is quite large.
So, to reduce the execution time, scheduling techniques can
be applied. Another consequence of decreasing the execution
time is the decrease in energy consumption, leading to less
greenhouse gases emitted and less money spent on electricity
or resources renting.
The goal of the research is to reduce the execution time
needed to perform several simulations in parallel. This is
done by using heuristics. To achieve this goal, I will first
present a representation of the application, and then suggest
a heuristic to minimize the execution time based on the given
representation of the application.
2.1 Ocean-Atmosphere
The proposed climate modeling application consists in ex-
ecuting simulations of present climate followed by the 21st
century, for a total of 150 years (scenario). A scenario
combines 1800 simulations of one month each (150×12),
launched one after the other. The results from the nth
monthly simulation are the starting point of the (n+1)th
monthly simulation. For the whole experiment, several sce-
narios must be performed. The number of months to be
simulated and the number of scenarios are chosen by the
user.
A one month simulation decomposes in three phases: a
pre-processing phase, a main-processing phase and a post-
processing phase. The pre-processing phase only takes a few
seconds while the main phase takes at least 20 minutes to
run in the best case. The post-processing phase needs a
few minutes to execute. To simplify the problem, the pre-
processing phase and the main phase are merged into one
task. The post-processing phase is also represented by a
single task. So, there are now two tasks: a main task and
a post-processing task. The former is a parallel task using
from 4 to 11 processors and the latter is a sequential task.
The speedup of the main task is superlinear.
Figure 1 shows the data dependencies between two consec-
utive months of a scenario. The left side presents the tasks
before merging them together, and the right side presents
the new merged tasks. The number after the small tasks
names are a possible time needed to execute a task.
caif1(1) mp1(1)
pcr1(1260)
caif2(1)
cof1(60)
emf1(60) cd1(60) pcr2(1260)
cof2(60)
emf2(60)
Figure 1: Chain of 2 consecutive monthly simula-
tions.
2.2 Scheduling
Using the representation defined in Section 2.1, the heuris-
tic we developed to run the application on a homogeneous
platform is the following: all the post-processing tasks are
scheduled at the end and the processors are divided in groups
on which the main tasks will be executed. The grouping is
computed using linear constraints. Solving the constraints
gives the groups of processors which will maximize the por-
tion of the application executed at each time unit. An es-
timation of the execution time of a one month simulation
is needed to compute the grouping. To obtain this time,
benchmarks must be conducted on the targetted platform.
Figure 2 shows a possible schedule for the tasks on the
resources of an homogeneous platform.
Resources
Time
Figure 2: Possible schedule.
The aim of this work is to execute the Ocean-Atmosphere
application on Grid’5000. Grid’5000 is composed of several
homogeneous clusters but they differ from one another. An-
other heuristic is added to take into account the heterogene-
ity between clusters. The idea is to schedule more scenarios
on a fast cluster than on a slow one. Each scenario is added
one by one on a cluster. The selected cluster is the one
where the execution time suffers the less of the addition of
a scenario.
2.3 Experimental Results
The heuristic has been implemented and tested on Grid’-
5000. Several problems occurred when performing these real
experiments. First, the application crashes for unknown
reasons, so a restart feature has been implemented in the
server running the application. Secondly, due to the mas-
sive amount of data between two consecutive months, it is
necessary to implement a flush mechanism to execute the
post-processing tasks and delete some temporary data. An-
other problem caused by large mount of data is the execu-
tion of the post-processing tasks: when we execute several
post-processing tasks in parallel, they all retrieve the needed
data from the NFS so it becomes saturated, leading then to
main1 a slowdown of the execution.
The last problem was a bug due to the implementation
of MPI we used. When dividing the resources in groups, it
mp2(1) post1 main2
is possible that the grouping separates a node between two
scenarios because all the nodes on Grid’5000 are at least bi-
cores. In such a case, MPI crashes. To tackle this problem,
we added an extra constraint to the choice of the number
post2
of resources per group: the number of resources in a group
must be divisible by the number of cores of each node. To re-
cd2(60)
duce the loss induced by this constraint, we allowed each sce-
nario to be executed on 12 resources instead of 11. Adding
the possible 12th resource diminishes the loss.
Simulations and real experimentation have been compared
and show that the simulated times for the main tasks are
quite good, but if the post-processing tasks are taken into
account, the simulations are always underestimating the ex-
ecution time.
This Section presented the heuristic used to execute Ocean-
Atmosphere over the grid. This works quite fine, but some
points must be changed if we want to achieve the best pos-
sible performances.
3. FUTURE WORK
The future work of my Ph.D. continues in the area of
scheduling over the grid. More precisely, I will work with
Diet, which is a GridRPC middleware, and develop new
scheduling algorithm to use in it. I already used Diet to per-
form the experiments of Ocean-Atmosphere on Grid’5000.
Diet is executed on grids which mostly of the time have a
batch scheduler to reserve resources, it is not always pos-
sible to use classical algorithms to schedule the new tasks
to execute. The reservation deadline, the load of the grid,
the migration of tasks and a lot of other parameters must
be all taken into account at the same time to provide effi-
cient scheduling heuristics. To test the new heuristics, we
will collaborate with other institutes to execute their appli-
cations. Several domains are envisaged such as cosmology
or calculations on sparse matrices.
4. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, I presented a case study of a cross-field re-
search project between computer science and climatology.
The climatology part is used to predict the changes in the
climate while the scheduling part is used to speedup the ex-
ecution of the simulations predicting the climate evolution.
I also gave a quick overview of some possible future work in
the continuity of my Ph.D.
- 582 -