Preemptive versus Non-Preemptive Processor Allocation Policies: An Empirical Comparison

When a parallel job arrives at a space-sharing multiprocessor system, a decision has to be made regarding the number and the specific identities of the allocated processors. A preemptive partitioning policy may preempt one or more of the currently running jobs to accommodate the new arrival. A non-preemptive policy may consider the state of the system at arrival time, however, it does not allow preemption of a job once the execution begins. In this paper preemptive and non-preemptive policies are presented and investigated experimentally. The performance of these policies are compared on the Intel Paragon. The workload model is based on matrix multiplication applications commonly found on large systems used for scientific applications. Results are reported for single and multiclass cases. A sensitivity analysis with respect to workload speedup characteristics is presented. Keywords: multiprocessor, preemptive scheduling policies, adaptive scheduling policies, message passing …