Representing Multi-Parent Organizational Structures for Use in High Performance Computing Resource Scheduling Algorithms

• Main Author: Brown, Lloyd T.
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2010
• Subjects: organizational structure; multiparent; HPC; multiple inheritance; Educational Administration and Supervision
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1982; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2981&context=etd

Historically, organizational structures of many universities and corporations have followed a strictly tree-based, hierarchical model. These organizations are defined with no more than one parent organization, and typically resource requirements for the organization could be derived from the parent organization. In recent years, however, many institutions have created interdisciplinary research groups which incorporate multiple fields of research across multiple campus organizations. For example, at Brigham Young University, there exists a biophysics research group, a child organization of both the Department of Biology and the Department of Physics, making it unclear how to define its resource requirements in the context of multiple parents from diverse colleges. As computing resources are allocated to organizations, the requirements of those organizations must be taken into account. However, when organizations have multiple parent organizations, it is unclear which restrictions or allocations are appropriate for the organization, as shown with the biophysics research group described above. Extending the example, if a campus high-performance computing facility restricts resources on an organizational basis, and the Biology and Physics departments are allocated different resource levels, the newly formed biophysics group will need system administrators' intervention to assure appropriate resource allocation. This document describes a versatile system for modeling organizational structure, including defining multiple parent organizations, the inheritance of arbitrary properties from parent to children, and, when inherited attributes conflict, includes an extensible mechanism for defining conflict resolution policies. This system allows for arbitrary parameters to be applied at any level of the organizational structure. This inherited information can then be used for resource allocation of the campus high performance computing facility.