Reducing the Number of Miscreant Tasks Executions in a Multi-use Cluster

Exploiting computational resources within an organisation for more than their primary task offers great benefits - making better use of capital expenditure and provides a pool of computational power. This can be achieved through the deployment of a cycle stealing distributed system, where tasks execute during the idle time on computers. However, if a task has not completed when a computer returns to its primary function the task will be preempted, wasting time (and energy), and is often reallocated to a new resource in an attempt to complete. This becomes exacerbated when tasks are incapable of completing due to excessive execution time or faulty hardware / software, leading to a situation where tasks are perpetually reallocated between computers - wasting time and energy. In this work we investigate techniques to increase the chance of `good´ tasks completing whilst curtailing the execution of ´bad´ tasks. We demonstrate, through simulation, that we could have reduce the energy consumption of our cycle stealing system by approximately 50%.