A robust and flexible microeconomic scheduler for parallel computers

We compare the behavior of a microeconomic scheduler with three commonly used scheduling policies under a systematically designed set of experiments. We experiment with three different income distribution policies within the economic scheduling algorithm. We show that the other scheduling policies can be considered as limiting cases of the microeconomic scheduling policy. Our results show that the economic scheduler performs the best overall, when mutually antagonistic criteria such as system and user response times an one hand and system utilization on the other hand, are considered. We conclude that the microeconomic scheduler exhibits robust performance across a broad range of parameters, and is flexible in permitting trade-offs between antagonistic goals.