ASCI Queuing Systems: Overview and Comparisons

This paper describes research in and a performance comparison of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) queuing algorithms using a newly developed simulator. The goal of this research is to develop models of the queuing systems used at the Sandia, Los Alamos, and Livermore National Laboratories (SNL, LANL, LLNL) and to study the strengths and weaknesses of the queuing algorithms. We present results of a number of simulation runs using actual job log data as well as generated job data where we analyze various performance metrics relating to overall facility utilization, responsiveness at the individual job level, and predictability in terms of run time. We find that the algorithms generally perform fairly closely to each other and are able to identify some manifestations of queuing policy in the performance metrics.