Distributed, Low Contention Task Allocation

Designing a good task allocation algorithm faces the challenge of allowing high levels of throughput, so that tasks are executed fast and processor parallelism is exploited, while still guaranteeing a low level of memory contention, so that performance does not suffer because of limitations on processor-to-memory bandwidth. In this paper, we present a comparative study of throughput and contention guarantees provided by load balancing networks, a new class of distributed, asynchronous algorithms for real-time task allocation in shared memory multiprocessors. Load balancing networks generalize balancing networks, to accommodate tasks with varying completion times.