On the Efficiency of Localized Work Stealing
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This paper investigates a variant of the work-stealing algorithm that we call the localized work-stealing algorithm. The intuition behind this variant is that because of locality, processors can benefit from working on their own work. Consequently, when a processor is free, it makes a steal attempt to get back its own work. We call this type of steal a steal-back. We show that the expected running time of the algorithm is T_1/P+O(T_∞ P), and that under the "even distribution of free agents assumption", the expected running time of the algorithm is T_1/P+O(T_∞ P). In addition, we obtain another running-time bound based on ratios between the sizes of serial tasks in the computation. If M denotes the maximum ratio between the largest and the smallest serial tasks of a processor after removing a total of O(P) serial tasks across all processors from consideration, then the expected running time of the algorithm is T_1/P+O(T_∞ M).
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