KOALA: a co-allocating grid scheduler

In multicluster systems, and more generally in grids, jobs may require co-allocation, that is, the simultaneous or coordinated access of single applications to resources of possibly multiple types in multiple locations managed by different resource managers. Co-allocation presents new challenges to resource management in grids, such as locating sufficient resources in geographically distributed sites, allocating and managing resources in multiple, possibly heterogeneous sites for single applications, and coordinating the execution of single jobs at multiple sites. Moreover, as single jobs now may have to rely on multiple resource managers, co-allocation introduces reliability problems. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a co-allocating grid scheduler named KOALA that meets these co-allocation challenges. In addition, we report on the results of an analysis of the performance in our multicluster testbed of the co-allocation policies built into KOALA. We also include the results of a performance and reliability test of KOALA while our testbed was unstable. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.