And I suppose there’s no equivalent of “timeslicing” where the cores run job A 
for 99% of the time and job B, C, D, E, F, for 1% of the time.


From: Alex Chekholko <a...@calicolabs.com>
Date: Thursday, January 16, 2020 at 3:50 PM
To: Jim Lux <james.p....@jpl.nasa.gov>
Cc: "beowulf@beowulf.org" <beowulf@beowulf.org>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Beowulf] Interactive vs batch, and schedulers

Hey Jim,

There is an inverse relationship between latency and throughput.  Most 
supercomputing centers aim to keep their overall utilization high, so the queue 
always needs to be full of jobs.

If you can have 1000 nodes always idle and available, then your 1000 node jobs 
will usually take 10 seconds.  But your overall utilization will be in the low 
single digit percent or worse.

Regards,
Alex

On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 3:25 PM Lux, Jim (US 337K) via Beowulf 
<beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>> wrote:
Are there any references out there that discuss the tradeoffs between 
interactive and batch scheduling (perhaps some from the 60s and 70s?) –
Most big HPC systems have a mix of giant jobs and smaller ones managed by some 
process like PBS or SLURM, with queues of various sized jobs.

What I’m interested in is the idea of jobs that, if spread across many nodes 
(dozens) can complete in seconds (<1 minute) providing essentially 
“interactive” access, in the context of large jobs taking days to complete.   
It’s not clear to me that the current schedulers can actually do this – rather, 
they allocate M of N nodes to a particular job pulled out of a series of 
queues, and that job “owns” the nodes until it completes.  Smaller jobs get run 
on (M-1) of the N nodes, and presumably complete faster, so it works down 
through the queue quicker, but ultimately, if you have a job that would take, 
say, 10 seconds on 1000 nodes, it’s going to take 20 minutes on 10 nodes.

Jim


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