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1. Tromino: Demand and DRF Aware Multi-Tenant Queue Manager for Apache Mesos Cluster

   https://doi.org/10.1109/UCC.2018.00015  

   Saha, Pankaj ; Beltre, Angel ; Govindaraju, Madhusudhan ( January 2019 , 2018 IEEE/ACM 11th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC))

   Apache Mesos, a two-level resource scheduler, provides resource sharing across multiple users in a multi-tenant clustered environment. Computational resources (i.e., CPU, memory, disk, etc.) are distributed according to the Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF) policy. Mesos frameworks (users) receive resources based on their current usage and are responsible for scheduling their tasks within the allocation. We have observed that multiple frameworks can cause fairness imbalance in a multi-user environment. For example, a greedy framework consuming more than its fair share of resources can deny resource fairness to others. The user with the least Dominant Share is considered first by the DRF module to get its resource allocation. However, the default DRF implementation, in Apache Mesos' Master allocation module, does not consider the overall resource demands of the tasks in the queue for each user/framework. This lack of awareness can lead to poor performance as users without any pending task may receive more resource offers, and users with a queue of pending tasks can starve due to their high dominant shares. In a multi-tenant environment, the characteristics of frameworks and workloads must be understood by cluster managers to be able to define fairness based on not only resource share but also resource demand and queue wait time. We have developed a policy driven queue manager, Tromino, for an Apache Mesos cluster where tasks for individual frameworks can be scheduled based on each framework's overall resource demands and current resource consumption. Dominant Share and demand awareness of Tromino and scheduling based on these attributes can reduce (1) the impact of unfairness due to a framework specific configuration, and (2) unfair waiting time due to higher resource demand in a pending task queue. In the best case, Tromino can significantly reduce the average waiting time of a framework by using the proposed Demand-DRF aware policy. 

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2. Exploring the Fairness and Resource Distribution in an Apache Mesos Environment

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CLOUD.2018.00061  

   Saha, Pankaj ; Beltre, Angel ; Govindaraju, Madhusudhan ( July 2018 , 2018 IEEE 11th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD))

   Apache Mesos, a cluster-wide resource manager, is widely deployed in massive scale at several Clouds and Data Centers. Mesos aims to provide high cluster utilization via fine grained resource co-scheduling and resource fairness among multiple users through Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF) based allocation. DRF takes into account different resource types (CPU, Memory, Disk I/O) requested by each application and determines the share of each cluster resource that could be allocated to the applications. Mesos has adopted a two-level scheduling policy: (1) DRF to allocate resources to competing frameworks and (2) task level scheduling by each framework for the resources allocated during the previous step. We have conducted experiments in a local Mesos cluster when used with frameworks such as Apache Aurora, Marathon, and our own framework Scylla, to study resource fairness and cluster utilization. Experimental results show how informed decision regarding second level scheduling policy of frameworks and attributes like offer holding period, offer refusal cycle and task arrival rate can reduce unfair resource distribution. Bin-Packing scheduling policy on Scylla with Marathon can reduce unfair allocation from 38% to 3%. By reducing unused free resources in offers we bring down the unfairness from to 90% to 28%. We also show the effect of task arrival rate to reduce the unfairness from 23% to 7%. 

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3. Deploying High Throughput Scientific Workflows on Container Schedulers with Makeflow and Mesos

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CCGRID.2017.9  

   Zheng, Chao ; Tovar, Ben ; Thain, Douglas ( May 2017 , IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing)

   Workflows are a widely used abstraction for describing large scientific applications and running them on distributed systems. However, most workflow systems have been silent on the question of what execution environment each task in the workflow is expected to run in. Consequently, a workflow may run successfully in the environment it was created, but fail on other platforms due to the differences in execution environment. Container-based schedulers have recently arisen as a potential solution to this problem, adopting containers to distribute computing resources and deliver well-defined execution environments to applications. In this paper, we con- sider how to connect workflow system to container schedulers with minimal performance loss and higher system efficiency. As an example of current technology, we use Makeflow and Mesos. We present five design challenges, and address them by using four configurations that connecting workflow system to container scheduler from different level of the infrastructure. In order to take full advantage of the resource sharing schema of Mesos, we enable the resource monitor of Makeflow to dynamically update the task resource requirement. We explore the performance of a large bioinformatics workflow, and observe that using Makeflow, Work Queue and the Resource monitor together not only increase the transfer throughput but also achieves highest resource usage rate. 

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4. Autoscaling High-Throughput Workloads on Container Orchestrators

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CLUSTER49012.2020.00024  

   Zheng, Chao ; Kremer-Herman, Nathaniel ; Shaffer, Tim ; Thain, Douglas ( September 2020 , IEEE Conference on Cluster Computing)

   null (Ed.)

   High-throughput computing (HTC) workloads seek to complete as many jobs as possible over a long period of time. Such workloads require efficient execution of many parallel jobs and can occupy a large number of resources for a longtime. As a result, full utilization is the normal state of an HTC facility. The widespread use of container orchestrators eases the deployment of HTC frameworks across different platforms,which also provides an opportunity to scale up HTC workloads with almost infinite resources on the public cloud. However, the autoscaling mechanisms of container orchestrators are primarily designed to support latency-sensitive microservices, and result in unexpected behavior when presented with HTC workloads. In this paper, we design a feedback autoscaler, High Throughput Autoscaler (HTA), that leverages the unique characteristics ofthe HTC workload to autoscales the resource pools used by HTC workloads on container orchestrators. HTA takes into account a reference input, the real-time status of the jobs’ queue, as well as two feedback inputs, resource consumption of jobs, and the resource initialization time of the container orchestrator. We implement HTA using the Makeflow workload manager, WorkQueue job scheduler, and the Kubernetes cluster manager. We evaluate its performance on both CPU-bound and IO-bound workloads. The evaluation results show that, by using HTA, we improve resource utilization by 5.6×with a slight increase in execution time (about 15%) for a CPU-bound workload, and shorten the workload execution time by up to 3.65×for an IO-bound workload. 

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5. Integration and Implementation (INT) CS 5604 F2020

   Hicks, Alexander ; Thazhath, Mohit ; Gupta, Suraj ; Long, Xingyu ; Poland, Cherie ; Hsieh, Hsinhan ; Mahajan, Yash ; Chandrasekar, Prashant ; Fox, Edward A. ( December 2020 , Information storage and retrieval)

   null (Ed.)

   The first major goal of this project is to build a state-of-the-art information storage, retrieval, and analysis system that utilizes the latest technology and industry methods. This system is leveraged to accomplish another major goal, supporting modern search and browse capabilities for a large collection of tweets from the Twitter social media platform, web pages, and electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). The backbone of the information system is a Docker container cluster running with Rancher and Kubernetes. Information retrieval and visualization is accomplished with containers in a pipelined fashion, whether in the cluster or on virtual machines, for Elasticsearch and Kibana, respectively. In addition to traditional searching and browsing, the system supports full-text and metadata searching. Search results include facets as a modern means of browsing among related documents. The system supports text analysis and machine learning to reveal new properties of collection data. These new properties assist in the generation of available facets. Recommendations are also presented with search results based on associations among documents and with logged user activity. The information system is co-designed by five teams of Virginia Tech graduate students, all members of the same computer science class, CS 5604. Although the project is an academic exercise, it is the practice of the teams to work and interact as though they are groups within a company developing a product. The teams on this project include three collection management groups -- Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD), Tweets (TWT), and Web-Pages (WP) -- as well as the Front-end (FE) group and the Integration (INT) group to help provide the overarching structure for the application. This submission focuses on the work of the Integration (INT) team, which creates and administers Docker containers for each team in addition to administering the cluster infrastructure. Each container is a customized application environment that is specific to the needs of the corresponding team. Each team will have several of these containers set up in a pipeline formation to allow scaling and extension of the current system. The INT team also contributes to a cross-team effort for exploring the use of Elasticsearch and its internally associated database. The INT team administers the integration of the Ceph data storage system into the CS Department Cloud and provides support for interactions between containers and the Ceph filesystem. During formative stages of development, the INT team also has a role in guiding team evaluations of prospective container components and workflows. The INT team is responsible for the overall project architecture and facilitating the tools and tutorials that assist the other teams in deploying containers in a development environment according to mutual specifications agreed upon with each team. The INT team maintains the status of the Kubernetes cluster, deploying new containers and pods as needed by the collection management teams as they expand their workflows. This team is responsible for utilizing a continuous integration process to update existing containers. During the development stage the INT team collaborates specifically with the collection management teams to create the pipeline for the ingestion and processing of new collection documents, crossing services between those teams as needed. The INT team develops a reasoner engine to construct workflows with information goal as input, which are then programmatically authored, scheduled, and monitored using Apache Airflow. The INT team is responsible for the flow, management, and logging of system performance data and making any adjustments necessary based on the analysis of testing results. The INT team has established a Gitlab repository for archival code related to the entire project and has provided the other groups with the documentation to deposit their code in the repository. This repository will be expanded using Gitlab CI in order to provide continuous integration and testing once it is available. Finally, the INT team will provide a production distribution that includes all embedded Docker containers and sub-embedded Git source code repositories. The INT team will archive this distribution on the Virginia Tech Docker Container Registry and deploy it on the Virginia Tech CS Cloud. The INT-2020 team owes a sincere debt of gratitude to the work of the INT-2019 team. This is a very large undertaking and the wrangling of all of the products and processes would not have been possible without their guidance in both direct and written form. We have relied heavily on the foundation they and their predecessors have provided for us. We continue their work with systematic improvements, but also want to acknowledge their efforts Ibid. Without them, our progress to date would not have been possible. 

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