Locality conscious processor allocation and scheduling for mixed parallel applications

Complex applications can often be viewed as a collection of coarse-grained data-parallel application components with precedence constraints. It has been shown that combining task and data parallelism (mixed parallelism) can be an effective execution paradigm for these applications. In this paper, we present an algorithm to compute the appropriate mix of task and data parallelism based on the scalability characteristics of the tasks as well as the intertask data communication costs, such that the parallel completion time (makespan) is minimized. The algorithm iteratively reduces the makespan by increasing the degree of data parallelism of tasks on the critical path that have good scalability and a low degree of potential task parallelism. Data communication costs along the critical path are minimized by exploiting parallel transfer mechanisms and use of a locality conscious backfill scheduler. Evaluation using benchmark task graphs derived from real applications as well as synthetic graphs shows that our algorithm consistently performs better than previous scheduling schemes.