Limits of Work-Stealing Scheduling

Authors:
Željko Vrba;Håvard Espeland;Pål Halvorsen;Carsten Griwodz
Affiliations:
Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, and Department of Informatics, University of Oslo,;Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, and Department of Informatics, University of Oslo,;Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, and Department of Informatics, University of Oslo,;Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, and Department of Informatics, University of Oslo,
Venue:
Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing
Year:
2009

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Abstract

The number of applications with many parallel cooperating processes is steadily increasing, and developing efficient runtimes for their execution is an important task. Several frameworks have been developed, such as MapReduce and Dryad, but developing scheduling mechanisms that take into account processing and communication requirements is hard. In this paper, we explore the limits of work stealing scheduler, which has empirically been shown to perform well, and evaluate load-balancing based on graph partitioning as an orthogonal approach. All the algorithms are implemented in our Nornir runtime system, and our experiments on a multi-core workstation machine show that the main cause of performance degradation of work stealing is when very little processing time, which we quantify exactly, is performed per message. This is the type of workload in which graph partitioning has the potential to achieve better performance than work-stealing.