HPC Resource Allocation
HPC resource allocation consists of a pipeline of methods by which distributed-memory work is assigned to distributed-memory resources to complete that work. This pipeline spans both system and application level software. At the system level, it consists of scheduling and allocation. At the application level, broadly speaking, it consists of discretization (meshing), partitioning, and task mapping. Scheduling, given requests for resources and available resources, decides which request will be assigned resources next or when a request will be assigned resources. When a request is granted, allocation decides which specific resources will be assigned to that request. For the application, HPC resource allocation begins with the discretization and partitioning of the work into a distributed-memory model and ends with the task mapping that matches the allocated resources to the partitioned work. Additionally, network architecture and routing have a strong impact on HPC resource allocation. Each of these problems is solved independently and makes assumptions about how the other problems are solved. We have worked in all of these areas and have recently begun work to combine some of them, in particular allocation and task mapping. We have used analysis, simulation, and real system experiments in this work. Techniques specific to any particular application have not been considered in this work.