Resilient Scheduling of Moldable Parallel Jobs to Cope With Silent Errors

We study the resilient scheduling of moldable parallel jobs on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. Moldable jobs allow for choosing a processor allocation before execution, and their execution time obeys various speedup models. The objective is to minimize the overall completion time or the makespan, when jobs can fail due to silent errors and hence may need to be re-executed after each failure until successful completion. Our work generalizes the classical scheduling framework for failure-free jobs. To cope with silent errors, we introduce two resilient scheduling algorithms,
Lpa-List
and
Batch-List
, both of which use the
List
strategy to schedule the jobs. Without knowing a priori how many times each job will fail,
Lpa-List
relies on a local strategy to allocate processors to the jobs, while
Batch-List
schedules the jobs in batches and allows only a restricted number of failures per job in each batch. We prove approximation ratios for the two algorithms under several prominent speedup models (e.g., roofline, communication, Amdahl, power, monotonic, and a mix model). An extensive set of simulations is conducted to evaluate different variants of the two algorithms, and the results show that they consistently outperform some baseline heuristics. Overall, our best algorithm is within a factor of 1.6 of a lower bound on average over the entire set of experiments, and within a factor of 4.2 in the worst case.