Distributing fixed time slices in heterogeneous networks of workstations (NOWs)

Authors:
Yassir Nawaz;Guang Gong
Affiliations:
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Venue:
ISPA'07 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications
Year:
2007

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Abstract

Heterogeneous Networks of Workstations (NOWs) offer a cost-effective solution for parallel processing. The completion time of a parallel task over NOWs depends on how the task is divided and distributed among the heterogeneous workstations. In this paper we present a distribution scheme which attempts to minimize the task's completion time over a heterogeneous NOWs. The scheme is based on the idea of distributing fixed time slices of work as opposed to fixed work slices. Our simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms both fixed and variable work distribution schemes commonly in use. The scheme is very simple and requires no active monitoring of the network. Furthermore it is adaptive and copes very well with the changes in background loads on workstations and network interference.