Performance comparison of processor scheduling strategies in a distributed-memory multicomputer system

Processor scheduling has received considerable attention in the context of shared memory multiprocessor systems but has not received as much attention in distributed memory multicomputers. Furthermore, most previous research in this area has either used a simulation model or an analytical model in evaluating the performance of various policies. Very often these models neglect several practical aspects of the system and workload. Our goal is to implement processor scheduling policies on a real system and evaluate their performance. We have used a transputer based system to implement two policies-one space sharing policy and one time sharing policy-in order to study the relative performance trade-offs involved. We have also implemented a hybrid space sharing and time sharing policy. We report on the performance sensitivity of these policies to various system and workload parameters