Broadcast Trees for Heterogeneous Platforms

In this paper, we deal with broadcasting on heterogeneous platforms. Typically, the message to be broadcast is split into several slices, which are sent by the source processor in a pipeline fashion. A spanning tree is used to implement this operation, and the objective is to find the tree which maximizes the throughput, i.e. the average number of slices sent by the source processor every time-unit. We introduce several heuristics to solve this problem. The good news is that the best heuristics perform quite efficiently, reaching more than 70% of the absolute optimal throughput, thereby providing a simple yet efficient approach to achieve very good performance for broadcasting on heterogeneous platforms.