What Makes Affinity-Based Schedulers So Efficient ?

The tremendous increase in the size and heterogeneity of supercomputers makes it very difficult to predict the performance of a scheduling algorithm. Therefore, dynamic solutions, where scheduling decisions are made at runtime have overpassed static allocation strategies. The simplicity and efficiency of dynamic schedulers such as Hadoop are a key of the success of the MapReduce framework. Dynamic schedulers such as StarPU, PaRSEC or StarSs are also developed for more constrained computations, e.g. task graphs coming from linear algebra. To make their decisions, these runtime systems make use of some static information, such as the distance of tasks to the critical path or the affinity between tasks and computing resources (CPU, GPU,\ldots) and of dynamic information, such as where input data are actually located. In this paper, we concentrate on two elementary linear algebra kernels, namely the outer product and the matrix multiplication. For each problem, we propose several dynamic strategies that can be used at runtime and we provide an analytic study of their theoretical performance. We prove that the theoretical analysis provides very good estimate of the amount of communications induced by a dynamic strategy, thus enabling to choose among them for a given problem and architecture.

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Source https://inria.hal.science/hal-00875487
Author Beaumont, Olivier, Marchal, Loris
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 9, 2026, 07:14 (UTC)
Created May 9, 2026, 07:14 (UTC)
Identifier hal-00875487
Language en
Rights https://about.hal.science/hal-authorisation-v1/
contributor Algorithmics for computationally intensive applications over wide scale distributed platforms (CEPAGE) ; Université Sciences et Technologies - Bordeaux 1 (UB)-Centre Inria de l'Université de Bordeaux ; Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-École Nationale Supérieure d'Électronique, Informatique et Radiocommunications de Bordeaux (ENSEIRB)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
creator Beaumont, Olivier
date 2013-10-18T00:00:00
harvest_object_id ef88c9a9-bf59-4c63-8db1-826617e675d0
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2025-10-13T00:00:00
set_spec type:UNDEFINED