The Parallel Evaluation of General Arithmetic Expressions
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Static scheduling algorithms for allocating directed task graphs to multiprocessors
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
A comparison of list schedules for parallel processing systems
Communications of the ACM
Scheduling Algorithms
Performance Analysis and Scheduling of Stochastic Fork-Join Jobs in a Multicomputer System
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Adaptive Scheduling for Master-Worker Applications on the Computational Grid
GRID '00 Proceedings of the First IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing
The ANL/IBM SP Scheduling System
IPPS '95 Proceedings of the Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing
Theory and Practice in Parallel Job Scheduling
IPPS '97 Proceedings of the Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing
On the Design and Evaluation of Job Scheduling Algorithms
IPPS/SPDP '99/JSSPP '99 Proceedings of the Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing
Developments from a June 1996 seminar on Online algorithms: the state of the art
Classifying scheduling policies with respect to unfairness in an M/GI/1
SIGMETRICS '03 Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Dynamic Task Assignment in Server Farms: Better Performance by Task Grouping
ISCC '02 Proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC'02)
Two Stage Optimization of Job Scheduling and Assignment in Heterogeneous Compute Farms
FTDCS '04 Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems
Value-maximizing deadline scheduling and its application to animation rendering
Proceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
Proceedings of the 11th workshop on ACM SIGOPS European workshop
Value-maximizing deadline scheduling and its application to animation rendering
Proceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
Autograph: automatically extracting workflow file signatures
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Recently HP Labs engaged in a joint project with DreamWorks Animation to develop a Utility Rendering Service that was used to render part of the computer-animated feature film Shrek 2. In a companion paper [2] we formalized the problem of scheduling animation rendering jobs and demonstrated that the general problem is computationally intractable, as are severely restricted special cases. We presented a novel and efficient two-phase scheduling method and evaluated it both theoretically and via simulation using large and detailed traces collected in DreamWorks Animation's production environment. In this paper we describe the overall experience of the joint project and greatly expand our empirical evaluations of job scheduling strategies for improving scheduling performance. Our new results include a workload characterization of DreamWorks Animation animation rendering jobs. We furthermore present parameter sensitivity analyses based on simulations using randomly generated synthetic workloads. Whereas our previous theoretical results imply that worst-case performance can be far from optimal for certain workloads, our current empirical results demonstrate that our scheduling method achieves performance quite close to optimal for both real and synthetic workloads. We furthermore offer advice for tuning a parameter associated with our method. Finally, we report a surprising performance anomaly involving a workload parameter that our previous theoretical analysis identified as crucial to performance. Our results also shed light on performance tradeoffs surrounding task parallelization.