Extensible machine resources

Physical machines are home to many types of resources these days. The traditional cores, memory, disk, now share space with gpus, co-processors or even protein sequence analysis accelerators.

To facilitate use and management of these resources, a new feature is available in HTCondor for extending machine resources. Analogous to concurrency limits, which operate on a pool / global level, machine resources operate on a machine / local level.

The feature allows a machine to advertise that it has specific types of resources available. Jobs can then specify that they require those specific types of resources. And the matchmaker will take into account the new resource types.

By example, a machine may have some GPU resources, an RS232 connected to your favorite telescope, and a number of physical spinning hard disk drives. The configuration for this would be,


SLOT_TYPE_1 = cpus=100%,auto

Aside – cpus=100%,auto instead of just auto because of GT3327. Also, the configuration for SLOT_TYPE_1 will likely go away in the future when all slots are partitionable by default.

Once a machine with this configuration is running,

$ condor_status -long | grep -i MachineResources
MachineResources = &quot;cpus memory disk swap gpu rs232 spindle&quot;

$ condor_status -long | grep -i -e TotalCpus -e TotalMemory -e TotalGpu -e TotalRs232 -e TotalSpindle
TotalCpus = 24
TotalMemory = 49152
TotalGpu = 2
TotalRs232 = 1
TotalSpindle = 4

$ condor_status -long | grep -i -e ^Cpus -e ^Memory -e ^Gpu -e ^Rs232 -e ^Spindle
Cpus = 24
Memory = 49152
Gpu = 2
Rs232 = 1
Spindle = 4

As you can see, the machine is reporting the different types of resources, how many of each it has and how many are currently available.

A job can take advantage of these new types of resources using a syntax already familiar for requesting resources from partitionable slots.

To consume one of the GPUs,

cmd = luxmark.sh

request_gpu = 1


Or for a disk intensive workload,

cmd = hadoop_datanode.sh

request_spindle = 1


With these jobs submitted and running,

$ condor_status
Name            OpSys      Arch   State     Activity LoadAv Mem ActvtyTime

slot1@eeyore    LINUX      X86_64 Unclaimed Idle      0.400 48896 0+00:00:28
slot1_1@eeyore  LINUX      X86_64 Claimed   Busy      0.000  128 0+00:00:04
slot1_2@eeyore  LINUX      X86_64 Claimed   Busy      0.000  128 0+00:00:04
                     Machines Owner Claimed Unclaimed Matched Preempting
        X86_64/LINUX        3     0       2         1       0          0
               Total        3     0       2         1       0          0

$ condor_status -l slot1@eeyore | grep -i -e ^Cpus -e ^Memory -e ^Gpu -e ^Rs232 -e ^Spindle
Cpus = 22
Memory = 48896
Gpu = 1
Rs232 = 1
Spindle = 3

That’s 22 cores, 1 gpu and 3 spindles still available.

Submit four more of the spindle consuming jobs and you’ll find the fourth does not run, because the available number of spindles is 0.

Cpus = 19
Memory = 48512
Gpu = 1
Rs232 = 1
Spindle = 0

Since these custom resources are available as attributes in various ClassAds the same way Cpu, Memory and Disk are, all the policy, management and reporting capabilities you would expect is available.


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One Response to “Extensible machine resources”

  1. Lans Carstensen Says:

    Can extended resources be quantized into better scheduling buckets like memory and disk? If so, what’s the syntax for that?

    I.e. let’s say I wanted to model network bandwidth and use “tc” or some other system to accomplish that. Could I quantize into buckets for better dispatching?

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