Dynamic scheduling of task graphs in multi-FPGA systems using critical path

SRAM-based FPGAs feature high performance and flexibility. Thus, they have found many applications in modern high-performance computing (HPC) systems. These systems suffer from the limitation of the computing resources problem for running HPC applications. Therefore, multi-FPGA systems have been emerged to alleviate such resource limitations. In this regard, efficient scheduling strategies are required to dynamically steer the execution of applications—represented as task graphs—on a set of connected FPGAs. In this paper, a heuristic-based dynamic critical path-aware scheduling technique named CPA is presented to schedule task graphs on multi-FPGA systems. The proposed technique, by considering the computation and communication capabilities of FPGAs, dynamically assigns priority to tasks in different steps in order to achieve better makespans. The proposed technique has been evaluated by conducting several experiments on real-world and three different shapes of random task graphs with different number of tasks, and its efficiency has been compared with that of three task graph scheduling approaches. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed CPA technique outperforms well-known heuristic scheduling strategies and improves their makespan by 13.47% on average. In addition, the experiments show that the proposed technique generates the schedules in the order of milliseconds and the average of its yielded makespans is 12.05% longer than that of an optimum schedule.