Memory management techniques for gang scheduling

The addition of time-slicing to space-shared gang scheduling improves the average response time of the jobs in a typical job stream. Recent research has shown that time-slicing is most effective when the jobs admitted for execution fit entirely into physical memory. The question is, how to select and map jobs to make the best use of the available physical memory. Specifically, the achievable degree of multi-programming is limited by the memory requirements, or physical memory pressure, of the admitted jobs. We investigate two techniques for improving the performance of gang scheduling in the presence of memory pressure: 1) a novel backfill approach which improves memory utilization, and 2) an adaptive multi-programming level which balances processor/memory utilization with job response time performance. Our simulations show that these techniques reduce the average wait time and slow-down performance metrics over naive first-come-first-serve methods on a distributed memory parallel system.