Client Side JSV Performance Comparison - And the Winner is: Go (#golang) ;-) (2014-03-15)

With JSV scripts you can verify and change your job submission parameters. Depending on the called functions you can also reject jobs which does not follow rules you specify in the script. Those JSV scripts can be installed globally on the qmaster (qconf -mconf / jsv_url parameter) or can be specified during job submission time with -jsv (client side jsv). With recent performance improvements when processing client side JSV scripts in UGE 8.1.7 it makes now sense to compare different scripting languages in which JSV scripts can be written.

With Sun Grid Engine or older Univa Grid Engine versions client side JSV script were slow, which was an issue when submitting massive amount of jobs in scripts. Now, depending on the scripting language the complete job submission time – including JSV processing within qsub - can go down to 38ms.

Because the Go programming language is fast and elegant I implemented the JSV protocol in a Go library, which I put under an open source license on my github account. You can get it from:

https://github.com/dgruber/jsv

Traditionally Grid Engine supports Java, TCL, Perl, and bash.

In order to compare the job submission time performance with a client side JSV I created a very basic script in Go, TCL, Perl and bash. Then I submitted jobs multiple times and measured the time with the “time” command line tool.

Following boxplots are showing the results. Not surprisingly Go (#golang) offers by far the fastest job submission performance (down to 38ms), while TCL and Perl are still good in performance. Bash is very slow but still can be used when not doing mass-submits.

NOTE: Without using JSV a qsub is still many times faster (down to 12ms in my VM). Using a multi-threaded submit tool based on DRMAA API (see an article here in my blog about Go DRMAA) I got an average per job submission time of 1-2ms.

JSV Performance

The scripts are adding the core binding parameter for a job (-binding linear:1). Below you can find the JSV scripts which I used for testing submission performance. All jobs where submitted with:

qsub -b y -jsv ./<script> sleep 123