SLA-BASED JOB SUBMISSION AND SCHEDULING WITH THE GLOBUS TOOLKIT 4

Abstract

High performance computing is nowadays mostly performed in a best effort
fashion. This is surprising as the closely related topic of grid computing, which
deals with the federation of resources from multiple domains in order to support
large jobs, and cloud computing, which promises seemingly infinite amounts of
compute and storage, both offer quality of service (QoS), albeit in different ways.
Long-term service level agreements (SLAs), which require the establishment of
SLAs long in advance of their actual usage, seem a promising way for the offering
of QoS guarantees in an HPC environment in a way that is not disruptive to the
business models employed today. This work uses the long-term SLA approach
as a basis for the provisioning of service levels for HPC resources and presents
an SLA management framework to support this. Flexibility is provided by
providing SLAs with different service levels, support for which is integrated
into job submission and scheduling. The SLA management framework can, on
a high level, be used in a generic fashion and an implementation is presented
that is evaluated against a motivating scenario.