Fair Scheduler in Hadoop

Fair Scheduler

·       The core idea behind the fair share scheduler was to assign resources to jobs such that on average over time, each job gets an equal share of the available resources. The result is that jobs that require less time are able to access the CPU and finish intermixed with the execution of jobs that require more time to execute. This behaviour allows for some interactivity among Hadoop jobs and permits greater responsiveness of the Hadoop cluster to the variety of job types submitted. The fair scheduler was developed by Facebook.

·       The Hadoop implementation creates a set of pools into which jobs are placed for selection by the scheduler.

Each pool can be assigned a set of shares to balance resources across jobs in pools (more shares equals greater resources from which jobs are executed). By default, all pools have equal shares, but configuration is possible to provide more or fewer shares depending upon the job type.

The number of jobs active at one time can also be constrained, if desired, to minimize congestion and allow work to finish in a timely manner.

·       To ensure fairness, each user is assigned to a pool. In this way, if one user submits many jobs, he or she can receive the same share of cluster resources as all other users (independent of the work they have submitted). Regardless of the shares assigned to pools, if the system is not loaded, jobs receive the shares that would otherwise go unused (split among the available jobs).

·       The scheduler implementation keeps track of the compute time for each job in the system. Periodically, the scheduler inspects jobs to compute the difference between the compute time the job received and the time it should have received in an ideal scheduler. The result determines the deficit for the task. The job of the scheduler is then to ensure that the task with the highest deficit is scheduled next.