RLScheduler: Learn to Schedule HPC Batch Jobs Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

We present RLScheduler, a deep reinforcement learning based job scheduler for scheduling independent batch jobs in high-performance computing (HPC) environment. From knowing nothing about scheduling at beginning, RLScheduler is able to autonomously learn how to effectively schedule HPC batch jobs, targeting a given optimization goal. This is achieved by deep reinforcement learning with the help of specially designed neural network structures and various optimizations to stabilize and accelerate the learning. Our results show that RLScheduler can outperform existing heuristic scheduling algorithms, including a manually fine-tuned machine learning-based scheduler on the same workload. More importantly, we show that RLScheduler does not blindly over-fit the given workload to achieve such optimization, instead, it learns general rules for scheduling batch jobs which can be further applied to different workloads and systems to achieve similarly optimized performance. We also demonstrate that RLScheduler is capable of adjusting itself along with changing goals and workloads, making it an attractive solution for the future autonomous HPC management.