Processor allocation and job scheduling on 3D mesh interconnection networks

Contiguous allocation of parallel jobs usually suffers from the degrading effects of fragmentation, because it requires that the alio-cated processors be contiguous and have the same topology as the network topology connecting these processors. This paper suggests two non-contiguous processor allocation strategies, referred to as Paging and Greedy-Available respectively, for the 3D mesh network and compares their performance using software simulation against the well-known contiguous First Fit strategy. The comparative evaluation is conducted for two job scheduling strategies, notably first-come-first-served (FCFS) and out-of-order (OO). The results reveal that our proposed non-contiguous strategies exhibit superior performance properties despite the added contention that results from non-contiguity. The results also reveal that the scheduling and allocation strategies both have substantial effect on the performance of contiguous and non-contiguous allocation in that the OO scheduling strategy leads to much better performance than its FCFS counterpart in the 3D mesh.