Prioritization in Parallel Symbolic Computing

It is argued that scheduling is an important determinant of performance for many parallel symbolic computations, in addition to the issues of dynamic load balancing and grain size control. We propose associating unbounded levels of priorities with tasks and messages as the mechanism of choice for specifying scheduling strategies. We demonstrate how priorities can be used in parallelizing computations in different search domains, and show how priorities can be implemented effectively in parallel systems. Priorities have been implemented in the Charm portable parallel programming system. Performance results on shared-memory machines with tens of processors and nonshared-memory machines with hundreds of processors are given. Open problems for prioritization in specific domains are given, which will constitute fertile area for future research in this field.

L.V. Kale and B. Ramkumar and V. Saletore and A. B. Sinha, "Prioritization in 
Parallel Symbolic Computing", Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 748,
ed. T. Ito and R. Halstead, Publ: Springer-Verlag, 1993, pp. 12-41.

@INPROCEEDINGS{PrioSymbLNCS93,
    author = "L.V. Kale and B. Ramkumar and V. Saletore and A. B. Sinha",
    title = "Prioritization in Parallel Symbolic Computing",
    booktitle = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
    volume = "748",
    year = "1993",
    editor = "T. Ito and R. Halstead",
    publisher = "Springer-Verlag",
    pages = "12-41",
    group = Y
}