Modular workload format: Extending SWF for modular systems

Abstract

This paper presents the Modular Workload Format (MWF), a proposal for extending the widely accepted Standard Workload Format (SWF) for job scheduling evaluation. David Talby and Dror Feitelson proposed the SWF in 1999, allowing to describe data center workload in a synthesized way. Its simplicity, representing each job by a single line in a text file and including details to make job scheduling evaluation quite accurate, was part of its success. Using these years’ experience but considering new system and workload characteristics, we propose an extension to support multiple steps in a single job, heterogeneous jobs, and relevant inputs not covered by the SWF as energy/power references. The goal of this contribution is to adapt the SWF to current trends in architectures and workloads. Moreover, we propose a simple approach for converting any already existing SWF trace file into an MWF trace file to be able to reuse already existing traces.