On the Complexity of Buffer Allocation in Message Passing Systems

摘要

In modern cluster systems, message passing functionality is often offloaded to the network interface card for efficiency reasons. However, this limits the amount of memory available for message buffers. Unfortunately, buffer insufficiency can cause an otherwise correct program to deadlock, or at least slow down. Hence, given a program trace from an execution in an unrestricted environment, determining the minimum number of buffers needed for a safe execution is an important problem. We present three related problems, all concerned with buffer allocation for safe and efficient execution. We prove intractability results for the first two problems and present a polynomial time algorithm for the third.