Load balancing multi-zone applications on a heterogeneous cluster with multi-level parallelism

Abstract

We investigate the feasibility of running parallel applications on heterogeneous clusters. The motivation for doing so is twofold. First, it is practical to be able to pull together existing machines to run a job that is too big for any one of them, especially if such jobs are run rarely. Second, in the event of an emergency, where a very large problem must be solved in a few days, it may not be feasible to purchase and install a new machine in time, and any existing machines will have to be brought to bear on the problem. We ran the Multi-zone versions of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) on a cluster composed of two SGI Origin 2000 servers, and an Intel SMP Xeon server connected by Gigabit Ethernet. We report on the results and their implications for running parallel applications on heterogeneous clusters.