Scheduling strategies for HPC as a service (HPCaaS)

One of the main advantages of HPC clusters is the flexibility and efficiency they bring to their user. With the increasing number of applications being served by HPC systems, new systems need to serve multiple users and multiple applications. Traditional HPC systems typically served a single application at a given time, but to maintain maximum flexibility a new concept of ldquoHPC as a servicerdquo (HPCaaS) has been developed. HPCaaS includes the capability of using clustered servers and storage as resource pools, a Web interface for users to submit their job requests, and a smart scheduling mechanism that can schedule multiple different applications simultaneously on a given cluster taking into considerations the different application characteristics for maximum overall productivity. The paper reviews the concept of HPCaaS and explores a smart scheduling algorithm for a subset of bioscience applications. In this paper we will show that smart scheduling can accommodate multiple applications and multiple jobs simultaneously while increasing the overall system productivity and efficiency.