Scheduling heuristics for efficient broadcast operations on grid environments

The popularity of large-scale parallel environments like computational grids has emphasised the influence of network heterogeneity on the performance of parallel applications. Collective communication operations are especially concerned by this problem, as heterogeneity interferes directly on the performance of the communication strategies. In this paper, we focus on the development of scheduling techniques to minimise the total communication time (makespan) of a broadcast operation on a grid environment. We observed that most optimisation techniques present in the literature are unable to deal with the complexity of a large network environment. In our work we propose the use of hierarchical communication levels to reduce the optimisation complexity, while keeping high performance levels. Indeed, we propose three heuristics designed to meet the requirements of a hierarchically structured grid composed of tenths of clusters, a tendency for the next years