Performance Impact of Processor and Memory Heterogeneity in a Network of Machines
Mohammed Javeed Zaki, Wei Li, Michał Cierniak · 1995
In this paper we present a summary of the issues that need to be dealt with to effectively use a heterogeneous network of machines. We specifically point out the impact of processor and memory heterogeneity on the performance of parallel programs. Our results indicate that processor speeds are application dependent and we show how to use this information along with memory constraints for efficient scheduling. 1 Introduction Network based distributed computing has attracted a lot of attention lately, due to the recent advances in high speed networks having low latency and high bandwidth, and due to the ubiquitous presence of workstations linked over LANs. With most of the machines in a network underutilized, there has been research on harnessing this power in a useful way, for example, to use the workstations to solve the so called "grand challenge" problems. A network of machines (NOM) can have heterogeneity at various levels [3]. More specifically, the NOM may be heterogeneous in the...