Cluster Workload Allocation: Semantic Soft Affinity Using Natural Language Processing

📅 2026-01-14
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
📄 PDF
🤖 AI Summary
This work proposes a semantic, intent-driven scheduling paradigm to address the limitations of existing cluster schedulers, which rely on complex configurations and struggle to express soft affinity preferences, leading to a usability gap. For the first time, large language models—such as Amazon Nova Pro/Premier and Mistral Pixtral Large—are integrated into a Kubernetes scheduler extension to interpret user scheduling intents expressed in natural language, enabling semantic soft affinity scheduling. The system leverages a cluster state cache and an AWS Bedrock–based intent analyzer. In evaluations, it achieves over 95% accuracy and matches or outperforms standard Kubernetes configurations across six scenarios, demonstrating particularly strong performance in complex, quantitative, and conflicting preference settings.

Technology Category

Application Category

📝 Abstract
Cluster workload allocation often requires complex configurations, creating a usability gap. This paper introduces a semantic, intent-driven scheduling paradigm for cluster systems using Natural Language Processing. The system employs a Large Language Model (LLM) integrated via a Kubernetes scheduler extender to interpret natural language allocation hint annotations for soft affinity preferences. A prototype featuring a cluster state cache and an intent analyzer (using AWS Bedrock) was developed. Empirical evaluation demonstrated high LLM parsing accuracy (>95% Subset Accuracy on an evaluation ground-truth dataset) for top-tier models like Amazon Nova Pro/Premier and Mistral Pixtral Large, significantly outperforming a baseline engine. Scheduling quality tests across six scenarios showed the prototype achieved superior or equivalent placement compared to standard Kubernetes configurations, particularly excelling in complex and quantitative scenarios and handling conflicting soft preferences. The results validate using LLMs for accessible scheduling but highlight limitations like synchronous LLM latency, suggesting asynchronous processing for production readiness. This work confirms the viability of semantic soft affinity for simplifying workload orchestration.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

cluster workload allocation
semantic soft affinity
natural language processing
usability gap
intent-driven scheduling
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Semantic Scheduling
Natural Language Processing
Large Language Model
Soft Affinity
Kubernetes Scheduler Extender
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
💼 Related Jobs
No related jobs found.
L
L. Sliwko
Standard Chartered Bank, EC2V 5DD London, U.K.
J
Jolanta Mizeria-Pietraszko
Department of Computer Science, Opole University of Technology, Opole, Poland