Proposition and Evaluation of Parallelism-Independent Scheduling Algorithms for DAGs of Tasks with Non-Uniform Execution Time

We propose two new algorithms for parallelism-independent scheduling. The machine code generated from the compiler using these algorithms in its scheduling phase is parallelism-independent code, executable in minimum time regardless of the number of the processors in the parallel computer. Our new algorithms have the following phases: finding the minimum number of processors on which the program can be executed in minimal time, scheduling by an heuristic algorithm for this predefined number of processors, and serialization of the parallel schedule according to the earliest start time of the tasks. At run time tasks are taken from the serialized schedule and assigned to the processor which allows the earliest start time of the task. The order of the tasks decided at compile time is not changed at run time regardless of the number of the available processors which means there is no out-of-order issue and execution. The scheduling is done predominantly at compile time and dynamic scheduling is minimized and diminished to allocation of the tasks to the processors. We evaluate the proposed algorithms by comparing them in terms of schedule length to the CP/MISF algorithm. For performance evaluation we use both randomly generated DAGs (directed acyclic graphs) and DACs representing real applications. From practical point of view, the algorithms we propose can be successfully used for scheduling programs for in-order superscalar processors and shared memory multiprocessor systems. Superscalar processors with any number of functional units can execute the parallelism-independent code in minimum time without necessity for dynamic scheduling and out-of-order issue hardware. This means that the use of our algorithms will lead to reducing the complexity of the hardware of the processors and the run-time overhead related to the dynamic scheduling.