Münster 2011 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 14: Instrumentierung III

HK 14.9: Talk

Monday, March 21, 2011, 18:30–18:45, HS2

Virtual Machine Scheduling in the ALICE HLT — •Stefan Boettger, Jochen Ulrich, Camilo Lara, Timo Breitner, Pierre Zelnicek, and Udo Kebschull — Kirchhoff-Institut for Physics, Heidelberg University, Germany

The ALICE HLT Cluster is dedicated to processing on-line data during the runtime of the ALICE experiment. However not all resources are constantly used for on-line processing. Our goal is to make use of these temporarily unused resources for running third party physics applications inside of virtual machines (vms). Uppermost priority is to minimize the probability that these vms interfere with the on-line processing. Therefore the first step is to find out about the resource requirements of the HLT processing components. From these requirements we derive policies, which describe free resources usable for vms. These policies we feed into a virtual machine scheduler, that runs vms wherever it is possible according to the policies. However there is no guarantee that either the HLT components or the vms will not consume more resources than described by the policies. In such a case the scheduler needs to resolve these policy violations by killing, stopping, suspending or live-migrating running vms. The choice for the proper vm-operation depends on its duration and impact on resource usage. In this work we present measurements for the resource usage of the HLT on-line components and derive according policies. Furthermore we show measurements for the vm-operations which help the scheduler to choose the best possible actions.