Gang scheduling with lightweight user-level communication

In this paper, we explore the performance of gang scheduling on a cluster using the Quadrics interconnection network. In such a cluster, the scheduler can take advantage of this network's unique capabilities, including a network interface card-based processor and memory and efficient user-level communication libraries. We developed a micro-benchmark to test the scheduler's performance under various aspects of parallel job workloads: memory usage, bandwidth and latency-bound communication, number of processes, timeslice quantum, and multiprogramming levels. Our experiments show that the gang scheduler performs relatively well under most workload conditions, is largely insensitive to the number of concurrent jobs in the system and scales almost linearly with number of nodes. On the other hand, the scheduler is very sensitive to the timeslice quantum, and values under 30 seconds can incur large overheads and fairness problems.