+The nodes in a heterogeneous grid have different computing powers, thus
+while executing message passing iterative synchronous applications, fast nodes
+have to wait for the slower ones to finish their computations before being able
+to synchronously communicate with them as in Figure~\ref{fig:heter}. These
+periods are called idle or slack times. The algorithm takes into account this
+problem and tries to reduce these slack times when selecting the frequency
+scaling factors vector. At first, it selects initial frequency scaling factors
+that increase the execution times of fast nodes and minimize the differences
+between the computation times of fast and slow nodes. The value of the initial
+frequency scaling factor for each node is inversely proportional to its
+computation time that was gathered from the first iteration. These initial
+frequency scaling factors are computed as a ratio between the computation time
+of the slowest node and the computation time of the node $i$ as follows:
+\begin{equation}
+ \label{eq:Scp}
+ \Scp[ij] = \frac{ \mathop{\max_{i=1,\dots N}}_{j=1,\dots,M}(\Tcp[ij])} {\Tcp[ij]}
+\end{equation}
+Using the initial frequency scaling factors computed in (\ref{eq:Scp}), the
+algorithm computes the initial frequencies for all nodes as a ratio between the
+maximum frequency of node $i$ and the computation scaling factor $\Scp[i]$ as
+follows:
+\begin{equation}
+ \label{eq:Fint}
+ F_{ij} = \frac{\Fmax[ij]}{\Scp[ij]},~{i=1,2,\dots,N},~{j=1,\dots,M}
+\end{equation}
+If the computed initial frequency for a node is not available in the gears of
+that node, it is replaced by the nearest available frequency. In
+Figure~\ref{fig:st_freq}, the nodes are sorted by their computing power in
+ascending order and the frequencies of the faster nodes are scaled down
+according to the computed initial frequency scaling factors. The resulting new
+frequencies are highlighted in Figure~\ref{fig:st_freq}. This set of
+frequencies can be considered as a higher bound for the search space of the
+optimal vector of frequencies because selecting scaling factors higher
+than the higher bound will not improve the performance of the application and it
+will increase its overall energy consumption. Therefore the algorithm that
+selects the frequency scaling factors starts the search method from these
+initial frequencies and takes a downward search direction toward lower
+frequencies or reaching to the lower bound. The lower bound is used to stop
+the algorithm search process when the new computed distance between the energy and performance is less than zero.
+The new negative distance is mean that the performance degradation ratio is higher than energy saving ratio.
+Therefore, the algorithm must stop the iterations before reaching to the end of the search space, the minimum frequencies,
+because the all the coming new distances are negative values.
+The algorithm iterates on all remaining frequencies, from the higher
+bound until all nodes reach their minimum frequencies or to the lower bound, to compute their overall
+energy consumption and performance, and select the optimal frequency scaling
+factors vector. At each iteration the algorithm determines the slowest node
+according to the equation (\ref{eq:perf}) and keeps its frequency unchanged,
+while it lowers the frequency of all other nodes by one gear. The new overall
+energy consumption and execution time are computed according to the new scaling
+factors. The optimal set of frequency scaling factors is the set that gives the
+highest distance according to the objective function (\ref{eq:max}).
+
+Figures~\ref{fig:r1} and \ref{fig:r2} illustrate the normalized performance and
+consumed energy for an application running on a homogeneous platform and a
+heterogeneous grid platform respectively while increasing the scaling factors. It can
+be noticed that in a homogeneous platform the search for the optimal scaling
+factor should start from the maximum frequency because the performance and the
+consumed energy decrease from the beginning of the plot. On the other hand, in
+the heterogeneous grid platform the performance is maintained at the beginning of the
+plot even if the frequencies of the faster nodes decrease until the computing
+power of scaled down nodes are lower than the slowest node. In other words,
+until they reach the higher bound. It can also be noticed that the higher the
+difference between the faster nodes and the slower nodes is, the bigger the
+maximum distance between the energy curve and the performance curve is while the
+scaling factors are varying which results in bigger energy savings.
