Deadline-Aware Online Job Scheduling for Distributed Training in Heterogeneous Clusters

The explosive growth in training data and model sizes has spurred the adoption of distributed deep learning (DL) in heterogeneous computing clusters. Efficiently scheduling distributed training jobs in such heterogeneous environments while ensuring they meet user-specified deadlines remains a critical challenge. While most existing works focus on reducing job completion time in homogeneous clusters, they pay little attention to meeting job deadlines in heterogeneous clusters. To address this issue, we propose Dancer (Deadline-Aware dyNamiC GPU allocation approach for Efficient Resource utilization), a novel framework that dynamically adjusts not only the number but the type of GPUs assigned to each job throughout its training lifecycle. Dancer aims to maximize the number of jobs meeting their deadlines in heterogeneous GPU clusters. It decouples job placement from resource allocation and formulates the scheduling optimization problem for maximizing the number of deadline-meeting jobs as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem. To solve this ILP problem in real-time, we propose an online algorithm with a competitive ratio guarantee, leveraging primal-dual and dynamic programming techniques. Extensive trace-driven simulations based on real-world DL workloads demonstrate that Dancer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, improving the deadline satisfactory ratio up to 58.9%–74.2%.