A Hybrid Parallel Loop Scheduling Scheme on Heterogeneous PC Clusters

Traditional loop-scheduling schemes are designed for homogeneous computing environments, and are probably not suitable for emerging heterogeneous PC clusters. This paper applies a two-phased method, named HPLS (Hybrid Parallel Loop Scheduling), to heterogeneous PC-cluster environments. The key idea is to distribute most of the workload to each node according to its performance, which is modeled and estimated in advance. Experiments on our testbed PCcluster showed that, in most cases, our method could reduce the execution time of application programs more than previous schemes could.