Title
Dynamic Thread Scheduling in Asymmetric Multicores to Maximize Performance-per-Watt
Abstract
Recent trends in technology scaling have enabled the incorporation of multiple processor cores on a single die. Depending on the characteristics of the cores, the multicore may be either symmetric (SMP) or asymmetric (AMP). Several studies have shown that in general, for a given resource and power budget, AMPs are likely to outperform their SMP counterparts. However, due to the heterogeneity in AMPs, scheduling threads is always a challenge. To address the issue of thread scheduling in AMP, we propose a novel dynamic thread scheduling scheme that continuously monitors the current characteristics of the executing threads and determines the best thread to core assignment. The real-time monitoring is done using hardware performance counters that capture several microarchitecture independent characteristics of the threads in order to determine the thread to core affinity. By controlling thread scheduling in hardware, the Operating System (OS) need not be aware of the underlying microarchitecture, significantly simplifying the OS scheduler for an AMP architecture. The proposed scheme is compared against a simple Round Robin scheduling and a recently published dynamic thread scheduling technique that allows swapping of threads (between asymmetric cores) at coarse grain time intervals, once every context switch (~20 ms for the Linux scheduler). The presented results indicate that our proposed scheme is able to achieve, on average, a performance/watt benefit of 10.5% over the previously published dynamic scheduling scheme and about 12.9% over the Round Robin scheme.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/IPDPSW.2012.118
IPDPS Workshops
Keywords
Field
DocType
round robin scheme,micro architecture independent characteristic,asymmetric multicore processor (amp),scheduling,realtime monitoring,performance-per-watt maximization,microarchitecture,dynamic thread scheduling technique,best thread,simple round robin scheduling,operating systems (computers),operating system,multiprocessing systems,thread swapping,linux scheduler,proposed scheme,amp architecture,core assignment,novel dynamic thread scheduling,multiple processor cores,technology scaling,dynamic scheduling scheme,maximize performance-per-watt,dynamic thread scheduling,round robin scheduling,asymmetric multicores,thread scheduling,real-time systems,instructions per cycle (ipc),os scheduler,real time systems,dynamic scheduling,instruction sets,benchmark testing,hardware,multicore processing
Fixed-priority pre-emptive scheduling,Fair-share scheduling,Computer science,Scheduling (computing),Parallel computing,Gang scheduling,Two-level scheduling,Thread (computing),Dynamic priority scheduling,Round-robin scheduling,Distributed computing
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2164-7062
978-1-4673-0974-5
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
15
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Arunachalam Annamalai1845.67
R. Rodrigues211110.56
Israel Koren31579175.07
Sandip Kundu41103137.18