Malleable-Lab: A Tool for Evaluating Adaptive Online Schedulers on Malleable Jobs

The emergence of multi-core computers has led to explosive development of parallel applications and hence the need of efficient schedulers for parallel jobs. Adaptive online schedulers have recently been proposed to exploit the multiple processor resource and shown good promise in theory. To verify the effectiveness of these parallel schedulers, it will be reassuring to test them extensively with various parallel workloads. Unfortunately it is still unknown how the job mixes will eventually evolve for multi-core computers; moreover, it is also non-obvious how the parallelism of a typical job will look like. To evaluate the dynamic behaviors of an adaptive scheduler under various scenarios, an ideal workload model for schedulers should thus allow the user to vary parallelism profiles of individual jobs as well as the job arrival patterns. In this paper, we present a tool called Malleable-Lab, which models malleable parallel jobs by extending the traditional moldable job models. Instead of generating a completely random parallelism, which does not allow clear account of the request-allocate responses, we identify several generic patterns of parallelism variations in parallel programs. Using Malleable-Lab we have evaluated two feedback-driven adaptive schedulers, namely, AG-DEQ (Adaptive-Greedy-DEQ) and ABG-DEQ (Adaptive B-Greedy-DEQ), and the well-known scheduler EQUI (Equi-partition). The results reveal that both feedback-driven schedulers outperform EQUI, but on the other hand suffer from high sensitivity to the scheduling overhead. We also found that ABG-DEQ exhibits better transient responses and stability than AG-DEQ. In conclusion, the tool has enabled us to analyze various aspects of the performance of online schedulers, and we have gained valuable insights for adaptive scheduling of parallel jobs on multiple processors.