Characterizing Machines and Workloads on a Google Cluster

Zitao Liu and Sangyeun Cho.

Proceedings of the 8th Int'l Workshop on Scheduling and Resource Management for Parallel and Distributed Systems (SRMPDS), Pittsburgh, PA, September 2012.

Abstract:

Cloud computing offers high scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness to meet emerging computing requirements. Understanding the characteristics of real workloads on a large production cloud cluster benefits not only cloud service providers but also researchers and daily users. This paper studies a large-scale Google cluster usage trace dataset and characterizes how the machines in the cluster are managed and the workloads submitted during a 29-day period behave. We focus on the frequency and pattern of machine maintenance events, job- and task-level workload behavior, and how the overall cluster resources are utilized.