An Approximation Algorithm for Broadcast Scheduling in Heterogeneous Clusters

Network of workstation (NOW) is a cost-effective alternative to massively parallel supercomputers. As commercially available off-theshelf processors become cheaper and faster, it is now possible to build a PC or workstation cluster that provides high computing power within a limited budget. However, a cluster may consist of different types of processors and this heterogeneity within a cluster complicates the design of efficient collective communication protocols. This paper shows that a simple heuristic called fastest-node-first (FNF) [2] is very effective in reducing broadcast time for heterogeneous cluster systems. Despite the fact that FNF heuristic does not guarantee an optimal broadcast time for general heterogeneous network of workstation, we prove that FNF always gives near optimal broadcast time in a special case of cluster, and this finding helps us show that FNF delivers guaranteed performance for general clusters. In a previous paper we showed a similar bound on the co...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: RTCSA
• Authors: Pangfeng Liu, Da-Wei Wang, Yi-Heng Guo
• Keywords: Broadcast Time, Optimal Broadcast Time, Real-Time Computing, RTCSA 2003, Workstation Cluster