Scheduling Cyclic Task Graphs with SCC-Map

Abstract

The Dataflow execution model has been shown to be a good way of exploiting TLP, making parallel programming easier. In this model, tasks must be mapped to processing elements (PEs) considering the trade-off between communication and parallelism. Previous work on scheduling dependency graphs have mostly focused on directed a cyclic graphs, which are not suitable for dataflow (loops in the code become cycles in the graph). Thus, we present the SCC-Map: a novel static mapping algorithm that considers the importance of cycles during the mapping process. To validate our approach, we ran a set of benchmarks in on our dataflow simulator varying the communication latency, the number of PEs in the system and the placement algorithm. Our results show that the benchmark programs run significantly faster when mapped with SCC-Map. Moreover, we observed that SCC-Map is more effective than the other mapping algorithms when communication latency is higher.