Backfilling Strategies for Scheduling Streams of Jobs on Computational Farms

This paper presents a set of strategies for scheduling a stream of batch jobs on the machines of a heterogeneous computational farm. Our proposal is based on a flexible backfilling, which schedules jobs according to a priority assigned to each job submitted for execution. Priority values are computed as a result of a set of heuristics whose main goal is to improve resources utilization and to meet the job QoS requirements. The heuristics consider job deadlines, estimated execution time and aging of the jobs in the scheduling queue. Furthermore, the set of software licenses required by a job is also considered. The different proposals have been compared through simulations. Performance figures show the applicability of our approach.