A Dynamic Processor Allocation Strategy for Mesh-Connected Multicomputers

The processor allocation problem in mesh multicamputers is to recognize and locate a free submesh that can accommodate a request for a submesh of a specified size. An efficient submesh allocation strategy is required for achieving high performance on mesh multicomputers. In this paper, we propose a new best-fit submesh allocation strategy for mesh multicomputers. The proposed strategy maintains and uses a free submesh list to get global information for free submeshes. For an allocation request the proposed strategy tries to allocate a best-fit submesh which causes the least amount of potential processor fragmentation so as to preserve the large free submeshes as many as possible for later requests. For this purpose, we introduce a novel function for quantifying the degree of potential fragmentation of submeshes. The proposed strategy has the complete submesh recognition capability. Extensive simulation is carried out t compare the proposed strategy with the previous strategies and experimental results indicate that the proposed strategy exhibits the best performance along with about 10% to 30% average improvement over the best previous strategy.