Mapping pipeline skeletons onto heterogeneous platforms

Abstract

Mapping applications onto parallel platforms is a challenging problem, that becomes even more difficult when platforms are heterogeneous - nowadays a standard assumption. A high-level approach to parallel programming not only eases the application developer's task, but it also provides additional information which can help realize an efficient mapping of the application. In this paper, we discuss the mapping of pipeline skeletons onto different types of platforms (from fully homogeneous to heterogeneous). We assume that a pipeline stage must be mapped on a single processor, and we establish new theoretical complexity results for two different mapping policies: a mapping can be either one-to-one (at most one stage per processor), or interval-based (interval of consecutive stages per processor). We provide several efficient polynomial heuristics for the most important policy/platform combination, namely interval-based mappings on platforms with identical communication links but different speed processors. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.