All shapes contiguous submesh allocation for 2D mesh multicomputers

Although contiguous allocation is known to suffer from high processor fragmentation, it is a viable allocation approach as it isolates jobs from one another, which can improve system security. Most recent contiguous allocation schemes proposed for two-dimensional meshes switch the orientation of allocation requests when allocation fails for the initial request orientation. This transformation was found to reduce processor fragmentation and improve system performance. In this paper, we propose to generalise this restricted transformation by permitting all request shapes. Using simulations, we show that this generalisation when combined with giving priority to allocating peripheral submeshes can result in significant system performance gains.