Toward Smart Scheduling in Tapis
This work addresses the challenge of simplifying job scheduling for users of remote cyberinfrastructure, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing Tapis services.
The paper tackles the problem of requiring users to manually specify job configurations in the Tapis framework by developing an intelligent job scheduling capability that automatically determines job attributes and dynamically provisions resources, with results including machine learning methods for predicting queue times on HPC systems.
The Tapis framework provides APIs for automating job execution on remote resources, including HPC clusters and servers running in the cloud. Tapis can simplify the interaction with remote cyberinfrastructure (CI), but the current services require users to specify the exact configuration of a job to run, including the system, queue, node count, and maximum run time, among other attributes. Moreover, the remote resources must be defined and configured in Tapis before a job can be submitted. In this paper, we present our efforts to develop an intelligent job scheduling capability in Tapis, where various attributes about a job configuration can be automatically determined for the user, and computational resources can be dynamically provisioned by Tapis for specific jobs. We develop an overall architecture for such a feature, which suggests a set of core challenges to be solved. Then, we focus on one such specific challenge: predicting queue times for a job on different HPC systems and queues, and we present two sets of results based on machine learning methods. Our first set of results cast the problem as a regression, which can be used to select the best system from a list of existing options. Our second set of results frames the problem as a classification, allowing us to compare the use of an existing system with a dynamically provisioned resource.