Prospects of Collaboration between Compute Providers by Means of Job Interchange

This paper empirically explores the advantages of the collaboration between different parallel compute sites in a decentralized grid scenario. To this end, we assume independent users that submit their jobs to their local site installation. The sites are allowed to decline the local execution of jobs by offering them to a central job pool. In our analysis we evaluate the performance of three job sharing algorithms that are based on the commonly used algorithms First-Come-First-Serve, EASY Backfilling, and List-Scheduling. The simulation results are obtained using real workload traces and compared to single site results. We show that simple job pooling is beneficial for all sites even if the local scheduling systems remain unchanged. Further, we show that it is possible to achieve shorter response times for jobs compared to the best single-site scheduling results.