A List Scheduling Heuristic with New Node Priorities and Critical Child Technique for Task Scheduling with Communication Contention

Task scheduling is an important aspect for parallel programming. In this paper, the program to be scheduled is modeled as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), and we target parallel embedded systems of multiple processors connected by buses and switches. This paper presents improvements for list scheduling heuristics with communication contention. We use new node priorities (top level and bottom level) to sort nodes and use an advanced technique of critical child to select a processor to execute a node. Experimental results show that our method is effective to reduce the schedule length, and the performance is greatly improved in the cases of medium and high communication. Since the communication cost is increasing from medium to high in modern applications like digital communication and video compression, our method will work well for scheduling these applications on parallel embedded systems.