Provably Efficient Scheduling for Languages with Fine-Grained Parallelism

Many high-level parallel programming languages allow for fine-grained parallelism. As in the popular work-time framework for parallel algorithm design, programs written in such languages can express the full parallelism in the program without specifying the mapping of program tasks to processors. A common concern in executing such programs is to schedule tasks to processors dynamically so as to minimize not only the execution time, but also the amount of space (memory) needed. Without careful scheduling, the parallel execution on p processors can use a factor of p or larger more space than a sequential implementation of the same program. This paper first identifies a class of parallel schedules that are provably efficient in both time and space. For any computation with w units of work and critical path length d, and for any sequential schedule that takes space s1, we provide a parallel schedule that takes fewer than w/p ϩ d steps on p processors and requires less than s1 ϩ p ⅐ d s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: SPAA
• Authors: Guy E. Blelloch, Phillip B. Gibbons, Yossi Matias
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Parallel Algorithm Design, Parallel Schedule, SPAA 1995, Space