An efficient non-contiguous processor allocation strategy for 2D mesh connected multicomputers

Abstract

In non-contiguous allocation, a job request can be split into smaller parts that are allocated possibly non-adjacent free sub-meshes rather than always waiting until a single sub-mesh of the requested size and shape is available. Lifting the contiguity condition is expected to reduce processor fragmentation and increase system utilization. However, the distances traversed by messages can be long, and as a result the communication overhead, especially contention, is increased. The extra communication overhead depends on how the allocation request is partitioned and assigned to free sub-meshes. In this paper, a new non-contiguous processor allocation strategy, referred to as Greedy-Available-Busy-List, is suggested for the 2D mesh network. Request partitioning in our suggested strategy is based on the sub-meshes available for allocation. To evaluate the performance improvement achieved by our strategy and compare it against well-known existing non-contiguous and contiguous strategies, we conduct extensive simulation runs under the assumption of wormhole routing and three communication patterns, notably one-to-all, all-to-all and random. The results show that the new strategy can reduce the communication overhead and substantially improve performance in terms of job turnaround time and system utilization.