ROSE: Cluster Resource Scheduling via Speculative Over-Subscription

A long-standing challenge in cluster scheduling is to achieve a high degree of utilization of heterogeneous resources in a cluster. In practice there exists a substantial disparity between perceived and actual resource utilization. A scheduler might regard a cluster as fully utilized if a large resource request queue is present, but the actual resource utilization of the cluster can be in fact very low. This disparity results in the formation of idle resources, leading to inefficient resource usage and incurring high operational costs and an inability to provision services. In this paper we present a new cluster scheduling system, ROSE, that is based on a multi-layered scheduling architecture with an ability to over-subscribe idle resources to accommodate unfulfilled resource requests. ROSE books idle resources in a speculative manner: instead of waiting for resource allocation to be confirmed by the centralized scheduler, it requests intelligently to launch tasks within machines according to their suitability to oversubscribe resources. A threshold control with timely task rescheduling ensures fully-utilized cluster resources without generating potential task stragglers. Experimental results show that ROSE can almost double the average CPU utilization, from 36.37% to 65.10%, compared with a centralized scheduling scheme, and reduce the workload makespan by 30.11%, with an 8.23% disk utilization improvement over other scheduling strategies.