MINIMAL SYNCHRONIZATION OVERHEAD AFFINITY SCHEDULING ALGORITHM FOR SHARED-MEMORY MULTIPROCESSORS

In addition to load balancing and synchronization overhead, affinity i s an important consideration for loop scheduling algorithms in modern multiprocessors. Algorithms based on affinity, like affinity schedulin g (AFS), do perform better than dynamic algorithms, such as guided sel f-scheduling (GSS) and trapezoid self-scheduling (TSS). However, there is still room for improvement in affinity scheduling. This paper sugg ests a modification to AFS which combines the advantages of both GSS a nd AFS. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed modification.