Contention-Free Scheduling in a Dynamic Context

In this paper, we present an adaptive method for scheduling parallel applications on heterogeneous multi-processor platforms, in a dynamic context. When executing divisible load applications according to a master-worker model, this method delivers the workload through multiple rounds and can avoid contentions in the use of the network. Such contentions avoidance is a means to avoid idle time, thus to maximize the throughput. Before presenting the proposed scheduling method, the paper revisits a runtime method which motivated its development. The method presented in this paper can be used to schedule parallel applications whose total workload is large but unknown a priori.