On the design of communication-aware task scheduling strategies for heterogeneous systems

Many research activities have focused on the problem of task scheduling in heterogeneous systems from the computational point of view. However an ideal scheduling strategy would also take into account the communication requirements of the applications and the communication bandwidth that the network can offer. In this paper, we first propose a criterion to measure the suitability of each allocation of network resources to each parallel application, according to the communication requirements. Second, we propose a scheduling technique based exclusively on this criterion that provides a near-optimal mapping of processes to processors according to the communication requirements. Evaluation results show that the use of this scheduling technique fully exploits the available network bandwidth, greatly improving network performance. Therefore, the proposed scheduling technique may be used in the design of communication-aware scheduling strategies for those situations where the communication requirements are the system performance bottleneck