On the importance of bandwidth control mechanisms for scheduling on large scale heterogeneous platforms

We study three scheduling problems (file redistribution, independent tasks scheduling and broadcasting) on large scale heterogeneous platforms under the Bounded Multi-port Model. In this model, each node is associated to an incoming and outgoing bandwidth and it can be involved in an arbitrary number of communications, provided that neither its incoming nor its outgoing bandwidths are exceeded. This model well corresponds to modern networking technologies, it can be used when programming at TCP level and is also implemented in modern message passing libraries such as MPICH2. We prove, using the three above mentioned scheduling problems, that this model is tractable and that even very simple distributed algorithms can achieve optimal performance, provided that we can enforce bandwidth sharing policies. Our goal is to assert the necessity of such QoS mechanisms, that are now available in the kernels of modern operating systems, to achieve optimal performance. We prove that implementations of optimal algorithms that do not enforce prescribed bandwidth sharing can fail by a large amount if TCP contention mechanisms only are used. More precisely, for each considered scheduling problem, we establish upper bounds on the performance loss than can be induced by TCP bandwidth sharing mechanisms, we prove that these upper bounds are tight by exhibiting instances achieving them and we provide a set of simulations using SimGRID to analyze the practical impact of bandwidth control mechanisms.