Evaluating HPC Scheduling Strategies for Urgent Workloads

Conference · Sat Nov 01 00:00:00 EDT 2025

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3731599.3767474· OSTI ID:3019946

Maheshwari, Ketan ^[1]; Borch, Anderson ^[2]; Webb, Jordan ^[1]; Etz, Brian ^[1]; Miller, Ross ^[1]; Suter, Fred ^[1]; Oral, Sarp ^[1]; Ferreira Da Silva, Rafael ^[1]

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1. ORNL
2. Colorado State University, Fort Collins

Scientific computing centers increasingly face workloads with diverse urgency requirements, driven by applications that demand rapid or even immediate execution. Appropriately configured scheduling policies can significantly improve both user satisfaction and overall cluster utilization. In this work, we present a systematic analysis of scheduler configurations under scenarios where a fraction of jobs have urgent computing needs. We evaluate multiple job scheduling simulators, develop a lightweight job-submission emulation framework, and create tools to analyze and visualize the resulting scheduling data. Our study identifies key trade-offs between responsiveness, fairness, and efficiency, and offers a set of practical scheduling configurations (particularly for Slurm) that can be tailored to HPC environments supporting mixed-urgency workloads.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC); USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 3019946
• Resource Type: Conference paper/presentation
• Conference Information: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC'26), Sixth Combined Workshop on Interactive and Urgent High-Performance Computing (WIUHPC) - St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America - 11/16/2025-11/21/2025
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English