Application-level scheduling on distributed heterogeneous networks

Heterogeneous networks are increasingly being used as platforms for resource-intensive distributed parallel applications. A critical contributor to the performance of such applications is the scheduling of constituent application tasks on the network. Since often the distributed resources cannot be brought under the control of a single global scheduler, the application must be scheduled by the user. To obtain the best performance, the user must take into account both application-specific and dynamic system information in developing a schedule which meets his or her performance criteria. In this paper, we define a set of principles underlying application-level scheduling and describe our work-in-progress building AppLeS (application-level scheduling) agents. We illustrate the application-level scheduling approach with a detailed description and results for a distributed 2D Jacobi application on two production heterogeneous platforms.