Is Work Stealing always the most appropriate user-level thread scheduling algorithm?

Posted by Il-Bhima on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Il-Bhima
Published on 2010-04-05T08:03:03Z Indexed on 2010/04/05 8:13 UTC
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Filed under:

scheduling

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algorithm

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load-balancing

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multithreading

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work-stealing

I've been investigating different scheduling algorithms for a thread pool I am implementing. Due to the nature of the problem I am solving I can assume that the tasks being run in parallel are independent and do not spawn any new tasks. The tasks can be of varying sizes.

I went immediately for the most popular scheduling algorithm "work stealing" using lock-free deques for the local job queues, and I am relatively happy with this approach. However I'm wondering whether there are any common cases where work-stealing is not the best approach.

For this particular problem I have a good estimate of the size of each individual task. Work-stealing does not make use of this information and I'm wondering if there is any scheduler which will give better load-balancing than work-stealing with this information (obviously with the same efficiency).

NB. This question ties up with a previous question.

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