[Swift-devel] scheduler stuff for Google Summer of Code 2009

[Ben Clifford]

Google Summer of Code 2009 mentor applications open in a couple of weeks. 
dev.globus likely will be applying again. I have a few ideas for Swift 
projects within dev.globus that I'd like to mentor.

One idea that I'm kinda fuzzy on but there might be interesting work to do 
is implementing more interesting scheduler behaviour.

Various people have talked in the past about these, that I think have some 
decent level of merit:

 a) changing ordering of execution of swift-level jobs based on how many
     other swift-level jobs depend on that first job

 b) reordering stageins and stageouts so to allow (in addition to the 
     present as-they-come (I think) policy) "prefer stageins" (which would 
     get more jobs going sooner, but incurring an expense in that 
     stageouts would happen slower, and in our present restart model 
     reduce the speed as which jobs complete enough for restart), and
     "prefer stageouts", which would get completed results out to submit 
     side faster, at the expense of job execution speed.

 c) data affinity - there was some messing round with this, but it
     resulted in code that did not work (which is fine for that project, 
     as it was not production code oriented, but not for committing to
     the codebase). So potentially this could be reimplemented or the 
     existing code tidied up as part of this.

Comments and additional ideas...

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