An Empirical Study of Task Scheduling Strategies for Image Processing Application on Heterogeneous Distributed Computing System

Abstract

Heterogeneous Distributed Computing (HDC) system consists of Workstations (WSs) and Personal Computers (PCs). In HDC system, each WS/PC may have different processor and performance. In order to take advantage of this diversity of processing power of a system, an effective task partitioning, scheduling, and load balancing are needed to get the optimum performance.

This paper examines the effectiveness of task partitioning and scheduling strategies for image (raytracing) processing application on HDC system. The static and dynamic/Run-time Task Scheduling (RTS) strategies are shown inadequate for balancing the load of HDC system. Two adaptive tasks scheduling strategies are proposed for HDC image computing system. These adaptive strategies are: i) Master Initiate Sub-task size (MIS) strategy (based on centralized resources management approach), and ii) Worker Initiated Sub-task size (WIS) strategy (based on semi-decentralized resources management approach). The measured results show that the adaptive (MIS & WIS) strategies dramatically improve the performance of HDC raytracing system and remedy the defects of static and RTS strategies. Performances of the all investigated strategies are evaluated on manager/master and workers model of HDC system. In performance comparisons of MIS and WIS strategies, the WIS strategy shows a slightly better speedup and scalability over MIS strategy.