A Reinforcement Learning Based Backfilling Strategy for HPC Batch Jobs

High Performance Computing (HPC) systems are used across a wide range of disciplines for both large and complex computations. HPC systems often receive many thousands of computational tasks at a time, colloquially referred to as “jobs”. These jobs must then be scheduled as optimally as possible so they can be completed within a reasonable timeframe. HPC scheduling systems often employ a technique called “backfilling”, wherein low-priority jobs are scheduled earlier to use the available resources that are waiting for the pending high-priority jobs. To make it work, backfilling largely relies on job runtime to calculate the start time of the ready-to-schedule jobs and avoid delaying them. It is a common belief that better estimations of job runtime will lead to better backfilling and more effective scheduling. However, our experiments show a different conclusion: there is a missing trade-off between prediction accuracy and backfilling opportunities. To learn how to achieve the best trade-off, we believe reinforcement learning (RL) can be effectively leveraged. Reinforcement Learning relies on an “agent” which makes decisions from observing the environment, and gains rewards or punishments based on the quality of its decision-making. Based on this idea, we designed RLBackfilling, a reinforcement learning-based backfilling algorithm. We show how RLBackfilling can learn effective backfilling strategies via trial-and-error on existing job traces. Our evaluation results show up to 17x better scheduling performance (based on average bounded job slowdown) compared to EASY backfilling using user-provided job runtime and 4.7x better performance compared with EASY using the ideal predicted job runtime (the actual job runtime).