When Network Matters: Data Center Scheduling with Network Tasks

We consider the placement of jobs inside a data center. Traditionally, this is done by a task orchestrator without taking into account network constraints. According to recent studies, network transfers represent up to 50% of the completion time of classical jobs. Thus, network resources must be considered when placing jobs in a data center. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling framework, introducing network tasks that need to be executed on network machines alongside traditional (CPU) tasks. The model takes into account the competition between communications for the network resources, which is not considered in the formerly proposed scheduling models with communication. Network transfers inside a data center can be easily modeled in our framework. As we show, classical algorithms do not efficiently handle a limited amount of network bandwidth. We thus propose new provably efficient algorithms with the goal of minimizing the makespan in this framework. We show their efficiency and the importance of taking into consideration network capacity through extensive simulations on workflows built from Google data center traces.