Static Strategies
Notes:
Strategies for Resource Allocation on Static Systems
This section discusses strategies for resource allocation on systems where the system cannot change a job’s assigned machine. Since it cannot reassign jobs to new machines, it cannot correct errors. This is a harsh test bed for any scheduling strategy, but these “static” systems are more common in the real world than “dynamic” systems where the system can relocate jobs.
The PVM Strategy, used in the popular PVM metacomputing package, assigns jobs in a round robin fashion.
The Enhanced PVM Strategy, developed in this work, performs job assignment on static systems. Our tests show that this strategy dramatically outperforms the PVM Strategy. Later on, we show that it also performs well against stronger strategies.
Our tests of the Enhanced PVM Strategy took place in two contexts:
- Inside a Java simulation, which allowed us to measure the various strategies’ performance in thousands of tests; and
- On a real system, where our 10,000+ second tests took 10,000+ real seconds per strategy. A smaller number of tests validated the Java simulation.