On the development of a communication-aware task mapping technique

Abstract

Clusters have become a very cost-effective platform for high-performance computing. In these systems, although currently existing networks actually provide enough bandwidth for the existing applications and workstations, the trend is towards the interconnection network becoming the system bottleneck. Therefore, in the future, scheduling strategies will have to take into account the communication requirements of the applications and the communication bandwidth that the network can offer. One of the key issues in these strategies is the task mapping technique used when the network becomes the system bottleneck.In this paper, we propose a communication-aware mapping technique that tries to match as well as possible the existing network resources to the communication requirements of the applications running on the system. Also, we evaluate the mapping technique using real MPI application traces with timestamps. Evaluation results show that the use of the proposed mapping technique better exploits the available network bandwidth, improving load balancing and increasing the throughput that can be delivered by the network. Therefore, the proposed technique can be used in the design of communication-aware scheduling strategies for those situations where the communication requirements lead the network bandwidth to become the system performance bottleneck.