Optimization Metrics for the Evaluation of Batch Schedulers in HPC

Abstract

Machine Learning techniques are taking a prominent position in the design of system softwares. In HPC, many work are proposing to use such techniques (specifically Reinforcement Learning) to improve the performance of batch schedulers. Their main limitation is the lack of transparency of their decision. This underlines the importance of choosing correctly the optimization criteria when evaluating these solutions. In this work, we discuss bias and limitations of the most frequent optimization metrics in the literature. We provide elements on how to evaluate performance when studying HPC batch scheduling. We also propose a new metric: the standard deviation of the utilization, which we believe can be used when the utilization reaches its limits. We then experimentally evaluate these limitations by focusing on the use-case of runtime estimates. One of the information that HPC batch schedulers use to schedule jobs on the available resources is user runtime estimates: an estimation provided by the user of how long their job will run on the machine. These estimates are known to be inaccurate, hence many work have focused on improving runtime prediction.