HMDS: A Makespan Minimizing DAG Scheduler for Heterogeneous Distributed Systems

Abstract

The problem of scheduling Directed Acyclic Graphs in order to minimize makespan ( schedule length ), is known to be a challenging and computationally hard problem. Therefore, researchers have endeavored towards the design of various heuristic solution generation techniques both for homogeneous as well as heterogeneous computing platforms. This work first presents HMDS-Bl , a list-based heuristic makespan minimization algorithm for task graphs on fully connected heterogeneous platforms. Subsequently, HMDS-Bl has been enhanced by empowering it with a low-overhead depth-first branch and bound based search approach, resulting in a new algorithm called HMDS . HMDS has been equipped with a set of novel tunable pruning mechanisms, which allow the designer to obtain a judicious balance between performance ( makespan ) and solution generation times, depending on the specific scenario at hand. Experimental analyses using randomly generated DAGs as well as benchmark task graphs, have shown that HMDS is able to comprehensively outperform state-of-the-art algorithms such as HEFT , PEFT , PPTS , etc., in terms of archived makespans while incurring bounded additional computation time overhead.