No abstract

We study the complexity of traversing tree-shaped workflows whose tasks require large I/O files. Such workflows typically arise in the multifrontal method of sparse matrix factorization. We target a classical two-level memory system, where the main memory is faster but smaller than the secondary memory. A task in the workflow can be processed if all its predecessors have been processed, and if its input and output files fit in the currently available main memory. The amount of available memory at a given time depends upon the ordering in which the tasks are executed. What is the minimum amount of main memory, over all postorder schemes, or over all possible traversals, that is needed for an in-core execution? We establish several complexity results that answer these questions. We propose a new, polynomial time, exact algorithm which runs faster than a reference algorithm. Next, we address the setting where the required memory renders a pure in-core solution unfeasible. In this setting, we ask the following question: what is the minimum amount of I/O that must be performed between the main memory and the secondary memory? We show that this latter problem is NP-hard, and propose efficient heuristics. All algorithms and heuristics are thoroughly evaluated on assembly trees arising in the context of sparse matrix factorizations.

In this paper, we propose the design of VoroNet, an objectbased peer to peer overlay network relying on Voronoi tessellations, along with its theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation. VoroNet differs from previous overlay networks in that peers are application objects themselves and get identifiers reflecting the semantics of the application instead of relying on hashing functions. This enables a scalable support for efficient search in large collections of data. In VoroNet, objects are organized in an attribute space according to a Voronoi diagram. VoroNet is inspired from the Kleinberg's small-world model where each peer gets connected to close neighbours and maintains an additional pointer to a long-range neighbour. VoroNet improves upon the original proposal as it deals with general object topologies and therefore copes with skewed data distributions. We show that VoroNet can be built and maintained in a fully decentralized way. The theoretical analysis of the system proves that routing in VoroNet can be achieved in a poly-logarithmic number of hops in the size of the system. The analysis is fully confirmed by our experimental evaluation by simulation.

Scientific applications are commonly modeled as the processing of directed acyclic graphs of tasks, and for some of them, the graph takes the special form of a rooted tree. This tree expresses both the computational dependencies between tasks and their storage requirements. The problem of scheduling/traversing such a tree on a single processor to minimize its memory footprint has already been widely studied. The present paper considers the parallel processing of such a tree and study how to partition it for a homogeneous multiprocessor platform, where each processor is equipped with its own memory. We formally state the problem of partitioning the tree into connected parts such that each part can be processed on a single processor and the total resulting processing time is minimized. We prove that the problem is NP-complete, and we design polynomial-time heuristics to address it. An extensive set of simulations demonstrates the usefulness of these heuristics.

In this paper, we consider steady-state scheduling techniques for heterogeneous systems, such as clusters and grids. We advocate the use of steady-state scheduling to solve a variety of important problems, which would be too difficult to tackle with the objective of makespan minimization. We give a few successful examples before discussing the main limitations of the approach. Résumé Nous nous intéressons ici aux techniques d'ordonnancement en régime permanent pour les plates-formes hétérogènes de type "grille de calcul". Nous montrons l'utilité de l'approche en régime permanent pour résoudre un certain nombre de problèmes importants, pour lequels chercher à minimmiser le temps d'exécution serait trop complexe. Nous donnons quelques exemples où cette technique a été couronnée de succès, avant de présenter ses principales limites.

In this paper, we focus on scheduling jobs on computing Grids. In our model, a Grid job is made of a large collection of input data sets, which must all be processed by the same task graph or workflow, thus resulting in a collection of task graphs problem. We are looking for a competitive scheduling algorithm not requiring complex control. We thus only consider single-allocation strategies. In addition to a mixed linear programming approach to find an optimal allocation, we present different heuristic schemes. Then, using simulations, we compare the performance of our different heuristics to the performance of a classical scheduling policy in Grids, HEFT. The results show that some of our static-scheduling policies take advantage of their platform and application knowledge and outperform HEFT, especially under communication-intensive scenarios. In particular, one of our heuristics, DELEGATE, almost always achieves the best performance while having lower running times than HEFT.

Abstract-In this paper, we consider the communications involved by the execution of a complex application, deployed on a heterogeneous platform. Such applications extensively use macrocommunication schemes, for example, to broadcast data items. Rather than aiming at minimizing the execution time of a single broadcast, we focus on the steady-state operation. We assume that there is a large number of messages to be broadcast in pipeline fashion, and we aim at maximizing the throughput, i.e., the (rational) number of messages which can be broadcast every time-step. We target heterogeneous platforms, modeled by a graph where resources have different communication and computation speeds. Achieving the best throughput may well require that the target platform is used in totality: We show that neither spanning trees nor DAGs are as powerful as general graphs. We show how to compute the best throughput using linear programming, and how to exhibit a periodic schedule, first when restricting to a DAG, and then when using a general graph. The polynomial compactness of the description comes from the decomposition of the schedule into several broadcast trees that are used concurrently to reach the best throughput. It is important to point out that a concrete scheduling algorithm based upon the steady-state operation is asymptotically optimal, in the class of all possible schedules (not only periodic solutions).

Abstract-Scheduling problems are already difficult on traditional parallel machines, and they become extremely challenging on heterogeneous clusters. In this paper, we deal with the problem of scheduling multiple applications, made of collections of independent and identical tasks, on a heterogeneous master-worker platform. The applications are submitted online, which means that there is no a priori (static) knowledge of the workload distribution at the beginning of the execution. The objective is to minimize the maximum stretch, i.e., the maximum ratio between the actual time an application has spent in the system and the time this application would have spent if executed alone. On the theoretical side, we design an optimal algorithm for the offline version of the problem (when all release dates and application characteristics are known beforehand). We also introduce a heuristic for the general case of online applications. On the practical side, we have conducted extensive simulations and MPI experiments, showing that we are able to deal with very large problem instances in a few seconds. Also, the solution that we compute totally outperforms classical heuristics from the literature, thereby fully assessing the usefulness of our approach.