The issue of scalability is key to the success of massively parallel processing. Due to their distributed nature, message-passing multicomputers are appropriate for achieving scalar performance. However, the message-passing model lacks programmability due to difficulties encountered by the programmers to partition and schedule the computation over the processors and to establish efficient inter-processor communication in the user code. Therefore, this paper presents a compile-time scheduling heuristic, called BLS, that maps programs onto the processors of a message-passing multicomputer. In contrast to other methods proposed, BLS takes a more global approach in attempt to balance the tradeoff between exploiting parallelism and reducing communication overhead. To evaluate the effectiveness of BLS, simulation studies of scheduling SISAL programs are presented.
Teaching tools for parallel processing
