Maximizing Speedup Through Self-Tuning of Processor Allocation

We address the problem of maximizing the speedup of an individual parallel job through the selection of an appropriate number of processors on which to run it. If a parallel job exhibits speedup that increases monotonically in the number of processors, the solution is clearly to make use of all available processors. However, many applications do not have this characteristic: they reach a point beyond which the use of additional processors degrades performance. For these applications, it is important to choose a processor allocation carefully. Our approach to this problem is to provide a runtime system that adjusts the number of processors used by the application based on dynamic measurements of performance gathered during its execution. Our runtime system has a number of advantages over user specified fixed allocations, the currently most common approach to this problem: (1) we are resilient to changes in an application's speedup behavior due to the input data; and (2) we are..

Maximizing Speedup Through Self-Tuning of Processor Allocation

We address the problem of maximizing the speedup of an individual parallel job through the selection of an appropriate number of processors on which to run it. If a parallel job exhibits speedup that increases monotonically in the number of processors, the solution is clearly to make use of all available processors. However, many applications do not have this characteristic: they reach a point beyond which the use of additional processors degrades performance. For these applications, it is important to choose a processor allocation carefully. Our approach to this problem is to provide a runtime system that adjusts the number of processors used by the application based on dynamic measurements of performance gathered during its execution. Our runtime system has a number of advantages over user specified fixed allocations, the currently most common approach to this problem: (1) we are resilient to changes in an application's speedup behavior due to the input data; and (2) we are able to c..