An I/O-aware scheduler for containerized data-intensive HPC tasks in Kubernetes-based heterogeneous clusters

Abstract: Cloud-native is a new computing paradigm that takes advantage of key characteristics of cloud computing, where applications are packaged as containers. The lifecycle of containerized applications is typically managed by container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, the most popular container orchestration system that automates the containers’ deployment, maintenance, and scaling. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestrators in the cloud-native era. Meanwhile, with the increasing demand for High-Performance Computing (HPC) over the past years, containerization is being adopted by the HPC community and various processors and special-purpose hardware are utilized to accelerate HPC applications. The architecture of cloud systems has been gradually shifting from homogeneous to heterogeneous with different processors and hardware accelerators, which raises a new challenge: how to exploit different computing resources efficiently? Much effort has been devoted to improving the use efficiency of computing resources in heterogeneous systems from the perspective of task scheduling, which aims to match different types of tasks to optimal computing devices for execution. Existing proposals do not take into account the variation in I/O performance between heterogeneous nodes when scheduling tasks. However, I/O performance is an important but often overlooked factor that can be a potential performance bottleneck for HPC tasks. This thesis proposes an I/O-aware scheduler named cmio-scheduler for containerized data-intensive HPC tasks in Kubernetes-based heterogeneous clusters, which is aware of the I/O throughput of compute nodes when making task placement decisions. In principle, cmio-scheduler assigns data-intensive HPC tasks to the node that fulfills the tasks’ requirements for CPU, memory, and GPU and has the highest I/O throughput. The experimental results demonstrate that cmio-scheduler reduces the execution time by 19.32% for the overall workflow and 15.125% for parallelizable tasks on average.