A Low-Cost Solution to Distribute Repetitive and Independent Tasks by Clustering

摘要

This paper evaluates three different solutions to distribute a list of independent tasks among the nodes of a cluster of computers. Operative systems are unable to take advantage of modern multicore or multiprocessor based computers in the execution of this kind of work when it is not paralellized, thus, the availability of a software tool that allows the concurrent use of a set of computers can be very useful in terms of reduction of the execution time and efficiency. The three solutions have been evaluated using a set of tasks related to the implementation of digital electronic circuits in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), hut they can he applied to any other set of independent tasks. The results have been obtained using a cluster composed by four relatively old and low performance computers, and have been compared with the results obtained by a quad-core processor based computer executing the same task list in a purely sequential way. This comparison clearly shows the power of concurrent execution, that allows a reduction of execution time by a factor between three and four.