Efficient Scheduling of Strict Multithreaded Computations

Panagiota Fatourou, Paul G. Spirakis

Abstract: In this paper we study the problem of efficiently scheduling a wide class of multithreaded computations, called strict; that is, computations in which all dependencies from a thread go to the thread's ancestors in the computation tree. Strict multithreaded computations allow the limited use of synchronization primitives. We present the first fully distributed scheduling algorithm which applies to any strict multithreaded computation. The algorithm is asynchronous, on-line, and follows the work-stealing paradigm. We prove that our algorithm is efficient not only in terms of its memory requirements and its execution time, but also in terms of its communication complexity. Our analysis applies to both shared and distributed memory machines.