Coscheduling under Memory Constraints in a NOW Environment

Abstract

Networks of Workstations (NOW) have become important and cost-effective parallel platforms for scientific computations. In practice, a NOW system is heterogeneous and non-dedicated. These two unique factors make scheduling policies on multiprocessor/multicomputer systems unsuitable for NOWs. However, the coscheduling principle is still an important basis for parallel process scheduling in these environments. We propose a new coscheduling algorithm for reducing the number of page faults across a non-dedicated cluster by increasing the execution priority of parallel tasks with lower page fault rate. Our method is based on knowledge of events obtained during execution, as communication activity and memory size of every task. The performance of our proposal has been analyzed and compared with other coscheduling implementations by means of simulation.KeywordsMemory RequirementMain MemoryLocal TaskPage FaultMemory ConstraintThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.