Scheduling of frequently communicating tasks

Gang scheduling is an efficient resource management scheme for distributed systems which combines elements of time sharing and space sharing. It is a suitable technique particularly in the case when parallel tasks have to be running concurrently to make progress in communication. This paper studies the impact on scheduling performance when dynamically generated sequential gangs exist in the workload. In the case of sequential gangs, a subsequent gang can be dynamically generated after the execution of the initial gang based on affinity information which resides on the caches of the previously seized processors. The performance of different gang‐scheduling algorithms is examined for various cases of workload compositions which range from cases with a low demand for dynamically generated gangs to cases with a high ratio of sequential gangs to solitary gangs. A simulation model is implemented to address associated performance issues. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.