A Scalable Clustering-Based Task Scheduler for Homogeneous Processors Using DAG Partitioning

Abstract

When scheduling a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of tasks with communication costs on computational platforms, a good trade-off between load balance and data locality is necessary. List-based scheduling techniques are commonly-used greedy approaches for this problem. The downside of list-scheduling heuristics is that they are incapable of making short-term sacrifices for the global efficiency of the schedule. In this work, we describe new list-based scheduling heuristics based on clustering for homogeneous platforms, under the realistic duplex single-port communication model. Our approach uses an acyclic partitioner for DAGs for clustering. The clustering enhances the data locality of the scheduler with a global view of the graph. Furthermore, since the partition is acyclic, we can schedule each part completely once its input tasks are ready to be executed. We present an extensive experimental evaluation showing the trade-offs between the granularity of clustering and the parallelism, and how this affects the scheduling. Furthermore, we compare our heuristics to the best state-of-the-art list-scheduling and clustering heuristics, and obtain more than three times better makespan in cases with many communications.