Characterization and enhancement of dynamic mapping heuristics for heterogeneous systems

Clusters of heterogeneous PCs/workstations have become attractive systems for executing a set of computationally intensive independent tasks. This paper focuses on scheduling schemes in a dynamic context - i.e. where scheduling decisions are made periodically as jobs arrive, in contrast to static scheduling where scheduling is performed after all jobs have been submitted. The paper characterizes different scheduling schemes with respect to varying arrival rates and burstiness in the job arrival rate. Using the insights gained by the characterization, a set of approaches are proposed to improve the previously developed strategies with respect to turnaround time. Simulation results indicate improvements of up to 40% in turnaround time by using the proposed enhancements.