A high performance, low complexity algorithm for compile-time task scheduling in heterogeneous systems

Heterogeneous computing systems are an interesting computing platforms due to the fact that a single parallel architecture may not be adequate for exploiting all of a program's available parallelism. In some cases, heterogeneous systems have been shown to produce higher performance for lower cost than a single large machine. Task scheduling is the key issue when aiming at high performance in these kind of systems. A large number of scheduling heuristics have been presented in the literature, most of them target only homogeneous computing systems. In this paper we present a simple scheduling algorithm based on list-scheduling and task-duplication on a bounded number of heterogeneous machines, called Heterogeneous Critical Parents with Fast Duplicator (HCPFD). The analysis and experiments have shown that HCPFD outperforms on average all other higher complexity algorithms. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.