A scheduling tool for parallel and distributed systems

This paper first briefly describes the PARSA (PARallel program Scheduling and Assessment) prototype tool. PARSA is designed to address the efficient partitioning and scheduling of parallel programs on multiprocessor systems. It then presents the scheduling methods that have been implemented in the PARSA prototype and provides a comparative performance evaluation of these schedulers. The PARSA prototype distinguishing features, demonstrated through several examples, include: (1) PARSA simplifies the application development process by eliminating synchronization, scheduling, and machine-dependent concerns; (2) applications developed with PARSA efficiently utilize parallel system resources; (3) PARSA allows development of portable parallel code across a wide range of concurrent systems; (4) applications developed with PARSA can be easily scaled to various sized parallel systems; and (5) PARSA supports fine-tuning of parallel application performance and/or their mappings on the target parallel system.