Don’t Call Me a Scheduler
The word scheduler, in a HPC context, is overloaded and can mean different things to different people. So, we shouldn’t use it anymore.
Tales from HPC Club: This is another idea that isn’t my own but came up in a conversation at HPC Club and is worthy of sharing. As always I won’t credit the person behind it accordance with club rules, but they’re always welcome to claim credit here 😁
Schedulers are the bread and butter of high performance computing. The problem is not all schedulers are created equal. Most, but not all, of the time when we refer to a scheduler, what we are really speaking about two distinct tasks that are being performed: Job management and resource management. But not always. Sometimes, all we’re really talking about (and probably need) is job management.
Which is fine. Until we start having a conversation and realise that we’re talking about very different capabilities. But are both referring to the thing that does this with the same name, a scheduler. My interlocuter’s take on this was that we should just stop using the word. Makes sense, if something means different things to different people, come up with a new word.
I fear that might be a big ask though. The word scheduler is ingrained into the psyche of most HPC practitioners. So maybe if we just qualified things a little. The tasks can be referred to as either job/task scheduling and resource scheduling. Referring to the products that do it might be trickier though… and I’m not opening that can of worms! 😏
Oh and please tell me the Tetris analogy makes sense… free 🆓 HPC Club merch for anyone explaining it
