So I’ve been experimenting with Alea in order to more practically test my theories around scheduling algorithms, and the effort is taking a detour. Essentially, Alea is not really capable of handling workloads of unknown type. It needs to be manually configured to handle workloads. There are hard-coded parameters everywhere, and code is tailored to deal with only the preset set of workloads.
What’s worse is that the scheduling algorithms are not correct. Fairshare, which is practically used by every grid scheduler is implemented as a simple FIFO. The list of issues go on… I am not saying that it is not a great tool and an ingenious idea, but rather that it is not generic enough to be used for my purposed or furthermore, commercialized!
To that end, I’ve been rewriting the code and modifying the guts of the program. I will keep it open source, but do intend to make it more generic for generic grid/HPC workloads.
More to come on this… In the mean time, if you like to get the updated source code, pls email me.
Art Sedighi