Optimal algorithms for scheduling divisible workloads on heterogeneous systems

In this paper, we discuss several algorithms for scheduling divisible loads on heterogeneous systems. Our main contributions are (i) new optimality results for single-round algorithms and (ii) the design of an asymptotically optimal multi-round algorithm. This multi-round algorithm automatically performs resource selection, a difficult task that was previously left to the user. Because it is periodic, it is simpler to implement, and more robust to changes in the speeds of the processors and/or communication links. On the theoretical side, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first published result assessing the absolute performance of a multi-round algorithm. On the practical side, extensive simulations reveal that our multi-round algorithm outperforms existing solution on a large variety of platforms, especially when the communication-to-computation ratio is not very high (the difficult case).