A Study of Memory-Aware Scheduling in Message Driven Parallel Programs

This paper presents a simple, but powerful memory-aware scheduling mechanism that adaptively schedules tasks in a message driven parallel program. The scheduler adapts its behavior whenever memory usage exceeds a threshold by scheduling tasks known to reduce memory usage. The usefulness of the scheduler and its low overhead are demonstrated in the context of an LU matrix factorization program. In the LU program, only a single additional line of code is required to make use of the new general-purpose memory-aware scheduling mechanism. Without memory-aware scheduling, the LU program can only run with small problem sizes, but with the new memory-aware scheduling, the program scales to larger problem sizes.

@inproceedings{MemoryAdaptiveScheduling,
 author = {Isaac Dooley and Chao Mei and Jonathan Lifflander and Laxmikant Kale},
 title = {A Study of Memory-Aware Scheduling in Message Driven Parallel Programs},
  booktitle = "PPL Technical Reports 2010",
  year = "2010",
  month = "March",
  number = "10-05",
  Institution = "Parallel Programming Laboratory, Department of
          Computer Science, University of Illinois at
          Urbana-Champaign"
}