Task scheduling on heterogeneous multiprocessor systems through coherent data allocation

Abstract

Abstract Energy consumption has become one of the main bottlenecks that limit the performance improvement of heterogeneous multiprocessor systems. In a heterogeneous distributed shared‐memory multiprocessor system (HDSMS), each processor can access all the memories, and each data can be stored in different memories. This article aims at addressing the problem of task scheduling and data allocation (TSDA) on HDSMS. To minimize the total energy consumption under a time constraint for TSDA, we propose two algorithms: the extended tree assignment for task scheduling incorporating data allocation (ETATS‐DA) and critical path task scheduling and data allocation (CPTSDA). The ETATS‐DA algorithm first utilizes the extended tree assignment to search the near optimal solution for task assignment, and then allocates data to memory based on the result of assignment. The CPTSDA algorithm considers TSDA jointly on a critical path simultaneously. Our proposed algorithms perform coherent data allocation under the consideration of best task scheduling by running two different heuristic strategies, respectively, and taking the best result as the final result. We conduct a large number of simulation experiments to test the performance of our algorithms, and the results validate the higher performance of our methods compared with the state‐of‐the‐art algorithms.