Trimaran: Load-Aware Scheduling for Power Efficiency and Performance Stability

Abstract

If you're experiencing a cluster where some nodes are stubbornly congested and others are not, or some nodes are spiky in their utilization, or some pods are able to burst freely yet others are not, then you may need to use a Trimaran scheduler. In this talk, we will provide an overview of the Trimaran scheduler plugins and demonstrate their utility. Basically, Trimaran plugins are load-aware schedulers which place pods on nodes based on actual measured node resource utilization, while considering requests and limits specifications of resources. Having utilization as an objective helps (1) minimize power consumption by targeting an optimal range of utilization, (2) avoid congestion and interference among multiple containers running on the same node, and (3) lower the risk of overcommitment when containers burst their usage to the specified limits.