Scheduling to Account for Interprocessor Communication within Interconnection-Constrained Processor Networks

Gilbert Sih and Edward A. Lee

Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Processing, pp 9-16, February, 1990.

ABSTRACT

Interprocessor communication (IPC) overhead can severely degrade the performance of parallel processing systems. This paper present a unified approach to the compile-time scheduling of precedence-constrained, communicating tasks onto arbitrarily interconnected processor networks containing dedicated communication hardware. Scheduling and routing are performed simultaneously to account for limited interconnections between processors, and shared resource contention is eliminated through the scheduling of all communications as well as computations. A new scheduling heuristic called dynamic level scheduling is proposed, which modifies the classical list scheduling methodology to account for IPC and synchronization overhead. This technique is fast, widely targetable, and displays promising performance results.