HP Labs Technical Reports

Alpha Message Scheduling for Packet-Switched Interconnects

Cherkasova, Ludmila; Rokicki, Tomas

HPL-94-71

Keyword(s):

Abstract: Evaluation of interconnect performance generally focuses on fixed-size packet latency as a function of traffic load. To an application, however, it is the latency of variable-length messages, rather than the individual packets, that is important. In this report, we discuss how scheduling the packet of messages according to various strategies can lead to effective performance differences of more than a factor of three. We present a new scheduling technique, called Alpha scheduling, that can combine the bandwidth-fairness of round robin scheduling while attaining close to the optimal performance of shortest-first scheduling. We demonstrate our results with a simple simulation model.

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