Reduction of Workflow Resource Consumption Using a Density-based Clustering Model

Often times, a researcher running a scientific workflow will ask for orders of magnitude too few or too many resources to run their workflow. If the resource requisition is too small, the job may fail due to resource exhaustion; if it is too large, resources will be wasted though job may succeed. It would be ideal to achieve a near-optimal number of resources the workflow runs to ensure all jobs succeed and minimize resource waste. We present a strategy for solving the resource allocation problem: (1) resources consumed by each job are recorded by a resource monitor tool; (2) a density-based clustering model is proposed for discovering clusters in all jobs; (3) a maximal resource requisition is calculated as the ideal number of each cluster. We ran experiments with a synthetic workflow of homogeneous tasks as well as the bioinformatics tools Lifemapper, SHRIMP, BWA and BWA-GATK to capture the inherent nature of resource consumption of a workflow, the clustering allowed by the model, and its usefulness in real workflows. In Lifemapper, the least time saving, cores saving, memory saving, and disk saving are 13.82%, 16.62%, 49.15%, and 93.89%, respectively. In SHRIMP, BWA, and BWA-GATK, the least cores saving, memory saving and disk saving are 50%, 90.14%, and 51.82%, respectively. Compared with fixed resource allocation strategy, our approach provide a noticeable reduction of workflow resource consumption.