Studying the impact of synchronization frequency on scheduling tasks with dependencies in heterogeneous systems

Many scheduling algorithms have been devised for nested loops with and without dependencies on general heterogeneous distributed systems (F.M. Ciorba et al., 2006). However, none addressed the case of dynamically computing and allocating chunks of non-independent tasks to processors. We propose a theoretical model that results in a function that estimates the parallel time of tasks in loops with dependencies on heterogeneous systems. We show that the minimum parallel time is obtained with a synchronization frequency that minimizes the function giving the parallel time. The accuracy of the model is validated through experiments from a practical application.