© 1990 by British Computer Society
Applications of UET Scheduling Theory to the Implementation of Declarative Languages


1 School of Computing Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, V5A 1S6, 2 School of Information Systems, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK
Motivated by our interest in the use of functional programming languages to write parallel programs, we have been led to consider the anomaly of more processors possibly leading to a slower execution time. After reviewing known results from the theory of list-scheduling, we introduce generalisations of the familiar breadth-first and depth-first tree-searching algorithms to arbitrary dags and consider them in a list-scheduling framework. We prove that with UET actions (corresponding to pre-emptive scheduling with integer execution times for actions), breadth-first scheduling never leads to an increase in the execution time when the number of processors is increased. We also prove that for any list-scheduling algorithm with UET actions, there is no speed-up anomaly when going from two to three processors.
Received April 1986. revised April 1987.
* School of Computing Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, V5A 1S6
School of Information Systems, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ.
¶ The work of this author was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. ECS-8312748 and grant no. DMC-8514946.
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