Scheduling Distributed Resources in Heterogeneous Private Clouds

We first consider the static problem of allocating resources to (i.e., scheduling) multiple distributed application frameworks, possibly with different priorities and server preferences, in a private cloud with heterogeneous servers. Several fair scheduling mechanisms have been proposed for this purpose. We extend prior results on max-min fair (MMF) and proportional fair (PF) scheduling to this constrained multiresource and multiserver case for generic fair scheduling criteria. The task efficiencies (a metric related to proportional fairness) of max-min fair allocations found by progressive filling are compared by illustrative examples. In the second part of this paper, we consider the online problem (with framework churn) by implementing variants of these schedulers in Apache Mesos using progressive filling to dynamically approximate max-min fair allocations. We evaluate the implemented schedulers in terms of overall execution time of realistic distributed Spark workloads. Our experiments show that resource efficiency is improved and execution times are reduced when the scheduler is "server specific" or when it leverages characterized required resources of the workloads (when known).