{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/learning-scheduling-algorithms-for-data","title":"Learning Scheduling Algorithms for Data Processing Clusters","arxiv_id":"1810.01963","date":"2018-10-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hongzi Mao","Malte Schwarzkopf","Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan","Zili Meng","Mohammad Alizadeh"],"abstract":"Efficiently scheduling data processing jobs on distributed compute clusters requires complex algorithms. Current systems, however, use simple generalized heuristics and ignore workload characteristics, since developing and tuning a scheduling policy for each workload is infeasible. In this paper, we show that modern machine learning techniques can generate highly-efficient policies automatically. Decima uses reinforcement learning (RL) and neural networks to learn workload-specific scheduling algorithms without any human instruction beyond a high-level objective such as minimizing average job completion time. Off-the-shelf RL techniques, however, cannot handle the complexity and scale of the scheduling problem. To build Decima, we had to develop new representations for jobs' dependency graphs, design scalable RL models, and invent RL training methods for dealing with continuous stochastic job arrivals. Our prototype integration with Spark on a 25-node cluster shows that Decima improves the average job completion time over hand-tuned scheduling heuristics by at least 21%, achieving up to 2x improvement during periods of high cluster load.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.01963v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.01963v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"learning-scheduling-algorithms-for-data","repo_url":"https://github.com/hongzimao/decima-sim","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"paper_slug":"learning-scheduling-algorithms-for-data","repo_url":"https://github.com/ArchieGertsman/spark-sched-sim","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"scheduling","task_name":"Scheduling"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"dagnn","method_name":"DAGNN"},{"method_slug":"reinforce","method_name":"REINFORCE"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1810.01963","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1810.01963"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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