Data Driven Workflow Planning in Cluster Management Systems.

Traditional scientific computing has been associated with harnessing computation cycles within and across clusters of machines. In recent years, scientific applications have become increasingly data-intensive. This is especially true in the fields of astronomy and high energy physics. Furthermore, the lowered cost of disks and commodity machines has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of free disk space spread across machines in a cluster. This space is not being exploited by traditional distributed computing tools. In this paper we have evaluated ways to improve the data management capabilities of Condor, a popular distributed computing system. We have augmented the Condor system by providing the capability to store data used and produced by workflows on the disks of machines in the cluster. We have also replaced the Condor matchmaker with a new workflow planning framework that is cognizant of dependencies between jobs in a workflow and exploits these new data storage capabilities to produce workflow schedules. We show that our data caching and workflow planning framework can significantly reduce response times for data-intensive workflows by reducing data transfer over the network in a cluster. We also consider ways in which this planning framework can be made adaptive in a dynamic, multi-user, failure-prone environment.