Reducing faulty jobs by job submission verifier in grid engine

Grid Engine is a Distributed Resource Manager (DRM), that manages the resources of distributed systems (such as Grid, HPC, or Cloud systems) and executes designated jobs which have requested to occupy or consume those resources. Grid Engine applies scheduling policies to allocate resources for jobs while simultaneously attempting to maintain optimal utilization of all machines in the distributed system. However, due to the complexity of Grid Engine’s job submission commands and complicated resource management policies, the number of faulty job submissions in data centers increases with the number of jobs being submitted. To combat the increase in faulty jobs, Grid Engine allows administrators to design and implement Job Submission Verifiers (JSV) to verify jobs before they enter into Grid Engine. In this paper, we will discuss a Job Submission Verifier that was designed and implemented for Univa Grid Engine, a commercial version of Grid Engine, and thoroughly evaluated at the High Performance Computing Center of Texas Tech University. Our newly developed JSV communicates with Univa Grid Engine (UGE) components to verify whether a submitted job should be accepted as is, or modified then accepted, or rejected due to improper requests for resources. It had a substantial positive impact on reducing the number of faulty jobs submitted to UGE by far. For instance, it corrected 28.6% of job submissions and rejected 0.3% of total jobs from September 2018 to February 2019, that may otherwise lead to long or infinite waiting time in the job queue.