Robust Scheduling for Large-Scale Distributed Systems

In large-scale distributed systems, such as clouds, failures are rather the norm than the exception. These failures include job failures, server failures, network outage and power failure. Among them, server failures are most common. With the wide adoption of cloud computing, the impact of server failures in clouds is far greater than that in traditional computer clusters as jobs of different tenants are often co-located (multi-tenancy). In this paper, we address the problem of robust scheduling, with realistic failure modeling, to minimize such impact on the execution of (co-located) jobs. To this end, we develop four online failure-aware (FA) scheduling algorithms, FAFF-WJ, FAFF-FC, FABF-WJ and FABF-FC, considering the availability and reliability of servers. In particular, FF (First-Fit) and BF (Best-Fit) indicate how the availability of servers is checked while WJ (Waiting Job) and FC (Failure Count) differ primarily in whether the reliability is measured from job's perspective or server's perspective. All four algorithms are designed essentially by combining these availability and reliability check methods. We evaluate our scheduling algorithms with failures generated based on our failure modeling of six real-world server failure traces. Our evaluation results show the effectiveness of our scheduling algorithms in robust job execution, with respect to both performance and cost.