Dynamic Process Management for Pipelined Applications

Many applications, particularly in the area of Signal and Image Processing (SIP) make use of what is referred to as a pipeline architecture. In these pipelined architectures, data are collected from some source and fed into a system for computation. This system is designed as a pipeline. That is, different processes are responsible for managing the data during different stages of the computation. The data move from one module, or task, to another, as in a pipeline. These types of systems have inherent load balancing problems. During times of low activity the pipeline becomes lightly utilized, wasting many of the resources making up the pipeline. During times of increased activity the pipeline is filled and a backlog develops due to there being insufficient resources to process all the available data. For single pipeline architectures this problem is exacerbated by the fact that data moves through the pipeline at the speed of the slowest process. This paper explores the use of MPI-2´s dynamic process management functionality as a method for handling this load imbalance.