Dynamic Memory Allocation for Scientific Workflows in Containers

Theodora Adufu, Jieun Choi, Yoonhee Kim

http://doi.org/

The workloads of large high-performance computing (HPC) scientific applications are steadily becoming “bursty” due to variable resource demands throughout their execution life-cycles. However, the over-provisioning of virtual resources for optimal performance during execution remains a key challenge in the scheduling of scientific HPC applications. While over-provisioning of virtual resources guarantees peak performance of scientific application in virtualized environments, it results in increased amounts of idle resources that are unavailable for use by other applications. Herein, we proposed a memory resource reconfiguration approach that allows the quick release of idle memory resources for new applications in OS-level virtualized systems, based on the applications resource-usage pattern profile data. We deployed a scientific workflow application in Docker, a light-weight OS-level virtualized system. In the proposed approach, memory allocation is fine-tuned to containers at each stage of the workflows execution life-cycle. Thus, overall memory resource utilization is improved.