Minimizing communication conflicts with load-skewing task assignment techniques on network of workstations

In a bus-based network of workstations, a perfectly load balance arrangement does not always lead to the best performance due to potential communication resource conflicts. Such a situation arises when work-stations tend to compete for the shared bus after they all finish their assigned workload at about the same time under such a load arrangement. In this paper, we provide a thorough analysis on how such communication conflicts can be minimized in a bus-based system by using a load-skewing assignment method. A probabilistic model is used to analyze the needed skewing factor for a one-stage divide-and-conquer programming paradigm. Our analytical results are closely confirmed by various simulation and experiment outcome. The proposed technique can also be extended to handle multi-stage cases