Using Processor Affinity in Loop Scheduling on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors

• Authors: E. P. Markatos;T. J. LeBlanc
• Venue: Using Processor Affinity in Loop Scheduling on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors
• Year: 1992

Loops are the single largest source of parallelism in many applications. One way to exploit this parallelism, and thereby minimize program execution time, is to execute loop iterations in parallel on different processors. Traditional approaches to loop scheduling attempt to achieve the minimum completion time by distributing the workload as evenly as possible, while minimizing the number of synchronization operations required. In this paper we consider a third dimension to the problem of loop scheduling on shared-memory multiprocessors: communication overhead caused by accesses to non-local data. We show that traditional algorithms for loop scheduling, which ignore the location of data when assigning iterations to processors, incur a significant performance penalty on modern shared-memory multiprocessors. We propose a new loop scheduling algorithm that attempts to simultaneously balance the workload, minimize synchronization, and co-locate loop iterations with the necessary data. We compare the performance of this new algorithm to other known algorithms using five representative applications on a Silicon Graphics multiprocessor workstation, a BBN Butterfly, and a Sequent Symmetry, and show that the new algorithm offers substantial performance improvements, up to a factor of 3 in some cases. We conclude that loop scheduling algorithms for shared-memory multiprocessors cannot afford to ignore the location of data, particularly in light of the increasing disparity between processor and memory speeds.