Scheduling Soft Real-Time Applications on NOWs

Due to the fall in the price of multicore processors, today´s non-dedicated clusters tend to include this kind of hardware in their configurations. How general purpose Operating System (OS) schedulers will support requirements like the coexistence of soft-real time, best effort or interactive applications are open questions that need to be addressed carefully. For these reasons, new user interfaces, middlewares, and environments that can fill the gap between the user and the new processor architectures are needed. Our job scheduler for non-dedicated clusters termed CISNE; has been extended to take into account issues discussed earlier: the mixture of different types of applications considering the multicore features of current desktop environments. We propose two initial policies for dual-core processors, both based on core affinity. We assign cores taking into account the kind of application (App) or the kind of user that owns the application (Usr). Experimentation, in terms of actual executions in a real cluster, and simulations has allowed us to see the success of our contributions.