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A task scheduling algorithm for arbitrarily-connected processors with awareness of link contention

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a new task scheduling algorithm, called Contention-Aware Scheduling (CAS) algorithm, with the objective of delivering good quality of schedules in low running-time by considering contention on links of arbitrarily-connected, heterogeneous processors. The CAS algorithm schedules tasks on processors and messages on links by considering the earliest finish time attribute with the virtual cut-through (VCT) or the store-and-forward (SAF) switching. There are three types of CAS algorithm presented in this paper, which differ in ordering the messages from immediate predecessor tasks. As part of the experimental study, the performance of the CAS algorithm is compared with two well-known APN (arbitrary processor network) scheduling algorithms. Experiments on the results of the synthetic benchmarks and the task graphs of the well-known problems clearly show that our CAS algorithm outperforms the related work with respect to performance (given in normalized schedule length) and cost (given in running time) to generate output schedules.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Engineering Department, Marmara University, 34722, Istanbul, Turkey

    Ali Fuat Alkaya & Haluk Rahmi Topcuoglu

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  1. Ali Fuat Alkaya
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  2. Haluk Rahmi Topcuoglu
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Correspondence to Haluk Rahmi Topcuoglu.

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Ali Fuat Alkaya received the B.Sc. degree in mathematics from Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1998, and the M.Sc. degree in computer engineering from Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2002. He is currently a Ph.D. student in engineering management department at the same university. His research interests include task scheduling and analysis of algorithms.

Haluk Rahmi Topcuoglu received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 1991 and 1993, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Syracuse University in 1999. He has been on the faculty at Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey since Fall 1999, where he is currently an Associate Professor in computer engineering department. His main research interests are task scheduling and mapping in parallel and distributed systems; parallel processing; evolutionary algorithms and their applicability for stationary and dynamic environments. He is a member of the ACM, the IEEE, and the IEEE Computer Society.

e-mail: haluk@eng.marmara.edu.tr

e-mail: falkaya@eng.marmara.edu.tr

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Alkaya, A.F., Topcuoglu, H.R. A task scheduling algorithm for arbitrarily-connected processors with awareness of link contention. Cluster Comput 9, 417–431 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-006-0010-7

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