[Nix-dev] [ANN] Hubble: Simulating Nix/Hydra build scheduling

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Over the last months I’ve had the opportunity to work on the scheduling
of Nix/Hydra build tasks as part of my work at INRIA Bordeaux Sud-Ouest
in the Cépage research team.  This has led to Hubble, a tool to simulate
the execution of Nix/Hydra build tasks:

  http://hubble.gforge.inria.fr/

The goal of Hubble is evaluate on-line scheduling algorithms for Nix
build tasks, on various platforms.  It implements a few scheduling
algorithms described in the literature.  For the impatient, results for
the cluster behind http://hydra.nixos.org/ are summarized here:

  http://hubble.gforge.inria.fr/hubble.html#sec-3_2

There is still work to be done, e.g., providing a synthetic comparison
of the scheduling algorithms on varying platforms, with varying number
of cores and cores per CPU, varying CPU power/bandwidth ratios, varying
levels of network/CPU heterogeneity, etc.

The next step would be to implement one of these algorithms in Nix
(possibly in the build hook) but it’s unclear whether I’ll have time to
work on this.

Feedback welcome!

I am thankful to my colleagues Nicolas Bonichon and Olivier Beaumont for
their support, and to Eelco Dolstra for providing me with build stats
From hydra.nixos.org that made it possible and for his valuable advice!

Ludo’.
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