Dynamic partitioning of loop iterations on heterogeneous PC clusters

Loop partitioning on parallel and distributed systems has been a critical problem. Furthermore, it becomes more difficult to deal with on the emerging heterogeneous PC cluster environments. In the past, some loop self-scheduling schemes have been proposed to be applicable to heterogeneous cluster environments. In this paper, we propose a performance-based approach, which partitions loop iterations according to the performance ratio of cluster nodes. To verify the proposed approach, a heterogeneous cluster is built, and three types of application programs are implemented to be executed in this testbed. Experimental results show that the proposed approach performs better than traditional schemes.