Simulative analysis of dynamic scheduling heuristics for reconfigurable computing of parallel applications

Abstract

The demand for processing power has been ever increasing with the growth of high-performance computing (HPC) applications and so have the constraints restricting the solutions to such requirements. High-performance distributed and parallel computing and custom-built, hardware-based computing have attempted to address this problem with some success but at a substantial cost. Recently, systems augmented with Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offering a fusion of traditional parallel and distributed machines with customizable and dynamically reconfigurable hardware have emerged as a cost-effective alternative to traditional systems. However, providing a robust runtime environment for such systems to which HPC users have become accustomed has been fraught with numerous challenges. Dynamic scheduling of large-scale HPC applications in such parallel reconfigurable computing (RC) environments is one such challenge and has not been sufficiently studied to our knowledge. In this paper, we simulatively analyze the performance of several common HPC scheduling heuristics that can be used by an automated job management service to schedule application tasks on a parallel RC system. We also present a performance prediction model which the scheduling heuristics employ to schedule several common HPC applications on a collection of typical FPGA processing platforms.