Abstract
We consider the problem of efficiently executing completely irregular, communication-intensive parallel programs. Completely irregular programs are those whose number of parallel threads as well as the amount of computation performed in each thread vary during execution. Our programs run on MIMD computers with some form of space-slicing (partitioning) and time-slicing (scheduling) support. A hardware barrier synchronization mechanism is required to efficiently implement the frequent communications of our programs, and this constrains the computer to a fixed size partitioning policy.
We compare the possible scheduling policies for irregular programs on fixed size partitions: local scheduling and multi-gang scheduling, and prove that local scheduling does better. Then we introduce competitive analysis and formally analyze the online rebalancing algorithms required for efficient local scheduling under two scenarios: with full information and with partial information.
This research was supported primarily by PMC-Sierra, Inc., San Jose, California. http://www.pmc-sierra.com
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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Ramakrishnan, V., Scherson, I.D. (2000). Executing Communication-Intensive Irregular Programs Efficiently. In: Rolim, J. (eds) Parallel and Distributed Processing. IPDPS 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1800. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45591-4_61
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45591-4_61
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