Online Task Scheduling on Heterogeneous Clusters: An Experimental Study

We study the problem of scheduling applications composed of a large number of tasks on heterogeneous clusters. Tasks are identical, independent from each other, and can hence be computed in any order. The goal is to execute all the tasks as quickly as possible. We use the Master-Worker paradigm, where tasks are maintained by the master which will hand out batches of a variable amount of tasks to requesting workers. We introduce a new scheduling strategy, the Monitor strategy, and compare it to other strategies suggested in the literature. An image filtering application, known as matched filtering, has been used to compare the different strategies. Our implementation involves datastaging techniques in order to circumvent the possible bottleneck incurred by the master, and multi-threading to prevent possible processor idleness.