Workload management of cooperatively federated computing clusters

Cooperative resource sharing enables distinct organizations to form a federation of computing resources. The motivation behind cooperation is that organizations are likely to serve each other by trading unused CPU cycles given the existence of irregular usage patterns of their local resources. In this way, resource sharing would enable organizations to purchase resources at a feasible level while meeting peak computational throughput requirements. This federation results in community grid that must be managed. A functional broker is deployed to facilitate remote resource access within the community grid. A major issue is the problem of correlations in job arrivals caused by seasonal usage and/or coincident resource usage demand patterns. These correlations incur high levels of burstiness in job arrivals causing the job queue of the broker to grow to an extent such that its performance becomes severely impaired. Since job arrivals cannot be controlled, management strategies must be employed to admit jobs in a manner that can sustain a fair level of resource allocation performance at all participating organizations in the community. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis of the problem of job traffic burstiness on resource allocation performance in order to elicit the general job management strategies to be employed. Based on the analysis, we define and justify a job management strategies for the resource broker to cope with overload conditions caused by job arrival correlations.