Scheduling deadline-constrained checkpointing on virtual clusters

We consider a context where the available resources of the Intranet of a company are used as a virtual cluster for scientific computation, during the idle periods (nights, weekends, holidays,). Generally, these idle periods do not permit to carry out completely the computations. For instance, a workstation mobilized during the night must be released in the morning to make it available for the employee, even if the application running on it is not completed. It is therefore necessary to save the context of uncompleted applications for possible restart. Hereafter we assume that the computations running on the workstations are independent from each other The checkpointing mechanism which ensures the continuity of applications is subject to resource constraints : the network bandwidth, the disk bandwidth and the delay T imposed for releasing the workstations. We first show that the designing of a scheduling strategy which optimizes resource consumption while taking into account the above constraints, can be formalized as a variant of the classical 0/1 knapsack problem. We then propose an algorithm whose implementation does not have a significant overhead on checkpointing mechanisms. Experiments carried out on a real cluster show that this algorithm performs better than the naive scheduling algorithm which selects the applications one after the other in order of decreasing amount of resource consumption.