Brief Announcement: Deadline-Aware Scheduling of Big-Data Processing Jobs

This paper presents a novel algorithm for scheduling big data jobs on large compute clusters. In our model, each job is represented by a DAG consisting of several stages linked by precedence constraints. The resource allocation per stage is malleable, in the sense that the processing time of a stage depends on the resources allocated to it (the dependency can be arbitrary in general). The goal of the scheduler is to maximize the total value of completed jobs, where the value for each job depends on its completion time. We design an algorithm for the problem which guarantees an expected constant approximation factor when the cluster capacity is sufficiently high. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for the problem. The algorithm is based on formulating the problem as a linear program and then rounding an optimal (fractional) solution into a feasible (integral) schedule using randomized rounding.