Performance and Fairness for Users in Parallel Job Scheduling

In this work we analyze the performance of scheduling algorithms with respect to fairness. Existing works frequently consider fairness as a job related issue. In our work we analyze fairness with respect to different users of the system as this is a very important real-life problem. First, we discuss how fair are selected popular scheduling algorithms with respect to different users of the system. Next, we present an extension to the well known Conservative backfilling algorithm. Instead of “ad hoc” decisions, the schedule is now created subject to evaluation and optimization. Notably, the fairness is considered as an important metric, which accompanies standard performance related metrics such as slowdown or wait time. To achieve that, an inclusion of fairness as an optimization criterion is proposed. The new extension improves the performance and fairness of Conservative backfilling with respect to other classical techniques such as FCFS, EASY backfilling or aggressive backfilling without reservations.