TR-97-4.ps.Z
X. Du, Y. Dong and X. Zhang
"Effectively scheduling parallel tasks and communications on
networks of workstations"
Proceedings of Euro-Par'97, August 1997, pp. 887-894.
Abstract
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Coordinating parallel tasks and minimizing communication delays are
two important issues for design of scheduling policies on networks
of workstations. We address the two issues by presenting a scheduling
scheme which consists of two parts: computation scheduling and
communication scheduling. The computation scheduler on each workstation
schedules its parallel task and local user jobs independently based
on a static power preservation in that workstation so that parallel
tasks on different workstations are executed at the same pace to
achieve a global coordination. To minimize communication latency, each
local scheduler uses a non-preemptive strategy to try to make
communication activities complete as soon as possible. The scheduling
scheme is evaluated by simulating the execution of four NAS benchmark
programs, and comparing it with a Unix-based scheduling policy and the
co-scheduling policy. Our experiments show that the power preservation
in each workstation guarantees the performance of both parallel
and local jobs. Furthermore, the communication delay is reduced
significantly by the communication scheduling compared with a
spinning based scheme and a Unix based scheme.