Contiguous processor allocation is useful for security and accounting reasons. This is due to the allocated jobs are separated from one another, where each sub-mesh of processors is allocated to an exclusive job request, and the allocated sub-mesh has the same size and shape of the requested job. The size and shape constraint leads to high processor fragmentation. Most recent contiguous allocation strategies suggested for 3D mesh-connected multiconputers try all possible orientations of an allocation request when allocation fails for the requested orientation, which reduces processor fragmentation and hence improves system performance. However, none of them considers all shapes of the request in the process of allocation. To generalize this restricted rotation, we propose, in this paper, a new contiguous allocation strategy for 3D mesh-connected multicomputers, referred to as All Shapes Busy List (ASBL for short), which takes into consideration all possible contiguous request shapes when attempting allocation for a job request. ASBL depends on the list of allocated sub-meshes, in the method suggested in (Bani-Mohammad et al., 2006), for selecting an allocated sub-mesh. The performance of the proposed ASBL allocation strategy has been evaluated considering several important scheduling strategies under a variety of system loads based on different job size distributions. The simulation results have shown that the ASBL allocation strategy improves system performance in terms of parameters such as the average turnaround time of jobs and system utilization under all scheduling strategies considered.
