Abstract

This paper studies the problem of efficiently scheduling fully strict (i.e., well-structured) multithreaded computations on parallel computers. A popular and practical method of scheduling this kind of dynamic MIMD-style computation is "work stealing," in which processors needing work steal computational threads from other processors. In this paper, we give the first provably good work-stealing scheduler for multithreaded computations with dependencies. Specifically, our analysis shows that the expected time TP to execute a fully strict computation on P processors using our work-stealing scheduler is TP = O(T 1 =P + T1 ), where T 1 is the minimum serial execution time of the multithreaded computation and T1 is the minimum execution time with an infinite number of processors. Moreover, the space SP required by the execution satisfies SP S 1 P . We also show that the expected total communication of the algorithm is at most O(T1SmaxP ), where Smax is the size of the largest activation...

Citations