SC Conference - Activity Details

Nagesh B. Lakshminarayana  (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Jaekyu Lee  (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Hyesoon Kim  (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Multicore Task Scheduling

Thursday,  02:30PM - 03:00PM

Room PB255

Asymmetric Multiprocessors (AMPs) are becoming popular in the current era of multicores due to their power efficiency and potential performance and energy efficiency. However, scheduling of multithreaded applications in AMPs is still a challenge. Scheduling algorithms for AMPs must not only be aware of asymmetry in processor performance, but should also consider characteristics of application threads. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling policy, Age based scheduling, that assigns a thread with a larger remaining execution time to a fast core. Age based scheduling predicts the remaining execution time of threads based on their age, i.e., when the threads were created. These predictions are based on the insight that most threads that are created together tend to have similar execution durations. Using Age based scheduling, we improve the performance of several multithreaded applications by 13% on average and up to 37% compared to the best of previously proposed mechanisms.

The full paper can be found in the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Computer Society