VMdeploy: Improving Best-Effort Job Management in Grid'5000

Abstract:,Virtualization technologies have recently gained a lot of interest in Grid computing as they allow flexible resource management.,Grid’5000 (G5K) is a French national Grid platform used for computer,science research to experiment,all layers of Grid software. Computer,scientists reserve G5K nodes prior to their experiments.,In G5K some,low priority jobs are executed,in best eort,mode on the node idle time slots when the latter are not part of any reservation. However, best-eort jobs may be killed at any time by the Grid job scheduler when the nodes they use are subject to higher priority reservation. This behaviour,potentially leads to a huge waste of compute time or at least requires users to deal with checkpoints of their best-eort,jobs. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the VMdeploy framework, which exploits virtual machines for executing best eort,jobs in order to solve the best-eort,issue in the G5K platform. VMdeploy manages snapshots of the best eort,jobs transparently to their users and thus ensures the progress of these jobs avoiding most of the waste of resources. Results of a preliminary experimental evaluation are presented. While designed in the context of G5K, VMdeploy can be used in combination,of any job scheduler in clusters and grids. Key-words: Virtualization, Grid, Best Eort jobs, Scheduling, Resource Management. The INRIA team,carries out this research,work,in the framework,of the XtreemOS project partially funded