9625875 Lilja, David J. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities CISE Postdoctoral Research Associateships in Experimental Computer Science: Processor Allocation in Hierarchical Heterogeneous Networks of Workstations The wide availability and reasonable cost of networks of workstations makes them an attractive alternative to traditional supercomputer systems. However, the low degree of uniformity in the execution and communication times of parallel applications in heterogeneous systems can impose significant constraints on the possible parallel task scheduling solutions. The primary goals of this work are to develop techniques for determining the appropriate number and type of processors to be allocated to each application in a heterogeneous network of multiprogrammed workstations, and to match the diverse hardware platforms to the computational and communication requirements of the specific application tasks. The proposed "matching factor," which provides a performance indicator for pairing hardware and applications in a dedicated environment, will be extended with scheduling heuristics for a network of multiprogrammed workstations with heterogeneous processor types and interconnection networks. The highly experimental nature of this work will greatly benefit from the interaction with computational scientists and engineers working at the University of Minnesota, and from the availability of the University's unique hardware and software resources. ***
