### Scheduling multithreaded computations by work stealingScheduling multithreaded computations by work stealing

Access Restriction
Subscribed

 Author Blumofe, Robert D. ♦ Leiserson, Charles E. Source ACM Digital Library Content type Text Publisher Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) File Format PDF Copyright Year ©1999 Language English
 Subject Domain (in DDC) Computer science, information & general works ♦ Data processing & computer science Subject Keyword Critical-path length ♦ Multiprocessor ♦ Multithreading ♦ Randomized algorithm ♦ Thread scheduling ♦ Work stealing Abstract This paper studies the problem of efficiently schedulling fully strict (i.e., well-structured) multithreaded computations on parallel computers. A popular and practical method of scheduling this kind of dynamic MIMD-style computation is “work stealing,” in which processors needing work steal computational threads from other processors. In this paper, we give the first provably good work-stealing scheduler for multithreaded computations with dependencies.Specifically, our analysis shows that the expected time to execute a fully strict computation on $\textit{P}$ processors using our work-stealing scheduler is $\textit{T}1/\textit{P}$ + $\textit{O}(\textit{T}$ ∞ ( 1 + $\textit{nd})\textit{S}max),$ where $\textit{S}max$ is the size of the largest activation record of any thread and $\textit{nd}$ is the maximum number of times that any thread synchronizes with its parent. This communication bound justifies the folk wisdom that work-stealing schedulers are more communication efficient than their work-sharing counterparts. All three of these bounds are existentially optimal to within a constant factor. ISSN 00045411 Age Range 18 to 22 years ♦ above 22 year Educational Use Research Education Level UG and PG Learning Resource Type Article Publisher Date 1999-09-01 Publisher Place New York e-ISSN 1557735X Journal Journal of the ACM (JACM) Volume Number 46 Issue Number 5 Page Count 29 Starting Page 720 Ending Page 748

#### Open content in new tab

Source: ACM Digital Library