Contention-aware scheduling with task duplication

Finding an efficient schedule for a task graph on several processors is a trade-off between maximising concurrency and minimising interprocessor communication. Task duplication is a technique that has been employed to reduce or avoid interprocessor communication. Certain tasks are duplicated on several processors to produce the data locally and avoid the communication among processors. Most of the algorithms using task duplication have been proposed for the classic scheduling model, which allows concurrent communication and ignores contention for communication resources. It is increasingly recognised that this classic model is unrealistic and does not permit creating accurate and efficient schedules. The recently proposed contention model introduces contention awareness into task scheduling by assigning the edges of the task graph to the links of the communication network. It is intuitive that scheduling under such a model benefits even more from task duplication, yet no such algorithm has been proposed as it is not trivial to duplicate tasks under the contention model. This paper proposes a contention-aware task duplication scheduling algorithm. We investigate the fundamentals for task duplication in the contention model and propose an algorithm that is based on state-of-the-art techniques found in task duplication and contention-aware algorithms. An extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the significant improvements to the speedup of the produced schedules. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.