Combining batch execution and leasing using virtual machines

As cluster computers are used for a wider range of applications, we encounter the need to deliver resources at particular times, to meet particular deadlines, and/or at the same time as other resources are provided elsewhere. To address such requirements, we describe a scheduling approach in which users request resource leases, where leases can request either as-soon-as-possible ("best-effort") or reservation start times. We present the design of a lease management architecture, Haizea, that implements leases as virtual machines (VMs), leveraging their ability to suspend, migrate, and resume computations and to provide leased resources with customized application environments. We discuss methods to minimize the overhead introduced by having to deploy VM images before the start of a lease. We also present the results of simulation studies that compare alternative approaches. Using workloads with various mixes of best-effort and advance reservation requests, we compare the performance of our VM-based approach with that of non-VM-based schedulers. We find that a VM-based approach can provide better performance (measured in terms of both total execution time and average delay incurred by best-effort requests) than a scheduler that does not support task pre-emption, and only slightly worse performance than a scheduler that does support task pre-emption. We also compare the impact of different VM image popularity distributions and VM image caching strategies on performance. These results emphasize the importance of VM image caching for the workloads studied and quantify the sensitivity of scheduling performance to VM image popularity distribution.