A study of memory-aware scheduling in message driven parallel programs

Abstract. This paper presents a simple, but powerful memory-aware scheduling mechanism that adaptively schedules tasks in a message driven parallel program. The scheduler adapts its behavior whenever memory usage exceeds a threshold by scheduling tasks known to reduce memory usage. The usefulness of the scheduler and its low overhead are demon-strated in the context of an LU matrix factorization program. In the LU program, only a single additional line of code is required to make use of the new general-purpose memory-aware scheduling mechanism. With-out memory-aware scheduling, the LU program can only run with small problem sizes, but with the new memory-aware scheduling, the program scales to larger problem sizes.