List scheduling: extension for contention awareness and evaluation of node priorities for heterogeneous cluster architectures

In the area of static scheduling, list scheduling is one of the most common heuristics for the temporal and spatial assignment of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to a target system. As most scheduling heuristics, list scheduling assumes fully connected homogeneous processors and ignores contention on the communication links. This article extends the list scheduling heuristic for contention aware scheduling on heterogeneous arbitrary architectures. The extension is based on the idea of scheduling edges to links, likewise the scheduling of nodes to processors. Based on this extension, we compare eight priority schemes for the node order determination in the first phase of list scheduling. Random graphs are generated and scheduled with the different schemes to homogenous and heterogeneous parallel systems from the area of cluster computing. Apart from identifying the best priority scheme, the results give new insights in contention aware DAG scheduling. Moreover, we demonstrate the appropriateness of our extended list scheduling for homogeneous and heterogeneous cluster architectures. 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.