Presentation
Extending a Work-Stealing Framework with Priorities and Weights
Event Type
Workshop
W
Algorithms
Architectures
Irregular Applications
TimeMonday, 18 November 201910:55am - 11:20am
Location505
DescriptionThis paper proposes priority- and weight-based steal strategies for an idle worker (thief) to select a victim worker in work-stealing frameworks. Typical work-stealing frameworks employ uniformly random victim selection. We implemented the proposed strategies on a work-stealing framework called Tascell; Tascell programmers can let each worker estimate and declare, as a real number, the amount of remaining work required to complete its current task so that declared values are used as priorities or weights in the enhanced Tascell framework. To reduce the total task-division cost, the proposed strategies avoid stealing small tasks. With a priority-based strategy, a thief selects the victim that has the highest known priority at that point in time. With a weight-based non-uniformly random strategy, a thief uses the relative weights of victim candidates as their selection probabilities. The proposed selection strategies outperformed uniformly random victim selection. Our evaluation uses a parallel implementation of the "highly serial'' version of the Barnes-Hut force-calculation algorithm in a shared memory environment and five benchmark programs in a distributed memory environment.
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