This paper describes a new approach to the scheduling problem that assigns tasks of a parallel program described as a task graph onto parallel machines. The approach handles interprocessor communication and heterogeneity, based on using both the theoretical results developed so far and a lookahead scheduling strategy. The experimental results on randomly generated task graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of this scheduling heuristic.

Reducing communication overhead is a key goal of program optimization for current scalable multiprocessors. A well-known approach to achieving this is to map tasks (indivisible units of computation) to processors so that communication and computation overlap as much as possible. In an earlier work, we developed a look-ahead scheduling heuristic for efficiently reducing communication overhead with the aim of decreasing the completion time of a given parallel program. In this paper, we report on an extension of the algorithm, which fills in the idle time slots created by interprocessor communication without increasing the algorithm's time complexity. The results of experiments emphasize the importance of optimally filling idle time slots in processors.

Parallelism on heterogeneous machines brings cost effectiveness, but also raises a new set of complex and challenging problems. This paper addresses the problem of estimating the minimum time taken to execute a program on a fine-grained parallel machine composed of different types of processors. In an earlier publication, we took the first step in this direction by presenting a graph-construction method which partitions a given program into several homogeneous parts and incorporates timing constraints due to heterogeneous parallelism into each part. In this paper, to make the method easier to be applied in a scheduling framework and to demonstrate its practical utility, we present an efficient implementation method and compare the results of its use to the optimal schedule lengths obtained by enumerating all possible solutions. Experimental results for several different machine models indicate that this method can be effectively used to estimate a program's minimum execution time.