Market Driven Resource Allocation Strawman

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Market Driven Resource Allocation Strawman

• University of Virginia Alliance for Computational
  Science and Engineering
• April 13, 2009

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Background

• Weve been examining a market based resource
  allocation mechanism rather than one size fits
  all for storage and a free for all for cycles.
• For now, assume the bookkeeping can be done.
• Define An SU, or service unit, is the basic
  allocation and costing unit.

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Background

• Historically CPU resources are free at UVA
• Different resources cost different amount some
  are more scarce.
• Queue controlled parallel machines are needed for
  some applications not others
• Some resource classes are much cheaper
• Desktop PCs (Windows, Linux, MacOS)
• There are more resource types than just CPU
• Storage, network, CPU, licensees
• Think of Amazons price model
• 0.1/CPU-hour, 0.1 GB-Month, 0.15/GB

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Strawman proposal

• Suppose that a UVA community member could get an
  account with 5,000 SUs just for asking
• Anything larger would require a proposal to the
  allocation and policy board which would allocate
  SUs up to 80 of centrally provided resources
  (this is similar to the NSF NRAC)
• Providers of resource for central management
  would receive a credit of 80 of the resource
  they provided (there are 8700 CPU hours in a
  year).
• People/departments could put their resources into
  the XCG and be paid in SUs for resources
  provided these SUs can be used as normal SUs
• Perhaps with a brokerage fee
• People/departments could purchase with real
  (grant) money additional SUs.

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Pricing for cycles

• At least three classes of resources
• Exclusive node, parallel job, high speed
  interconnect (IB)
• 1 SU/CPU hour
• High throughput single job with no pre-emption
• .5 SU/CPU hour
• High throughput single job with pre-emption or
  suspension
• .2 SU/CPU hour
• For each class of job there are three price
  classes (multipliers) low (.5), medium (1),
  right now (2)

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Three storage classes

• Backed up, centrally managed (1 SU GB/M)
• Highly available high performance file system
  no backup, slight risk of data loss (.5 SU GB/M)
• Selectable performance/availability raw devices
  via iSCSI that can be formatted as you wish (.5
  SU GB/M)