Computing Reviews
Today's Issue Hot Topics Search Browse Recommended My Account Log In
Review Help
Search
Survey of scheduling techniques for addressing shared resources in multicore processors
Zhuravlev S., Saez J., Blagodurov S., Fedorova A., Prieto M. ACM Computing Surveys45 (1):1-28,2012.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Apr 4 2013

The new scheduling challenges posed by chip multicore architectures have opened new research directions in operating system scheduling. This survey paper provides an excellent introduction to this fascinating topic for the reader who has some knowledge of scheduling, but who may lack specialist knowledge of chip multicore architectures.

Chip multiprocessors share resources like caches and memory controllers. Conventional schedulers, which treat each core as an independent processor, give rise to poor performance on multicore processors due to contention between threads for shared resources. Thread-level schedulers mitigate this problem.

Two approaches to thread-level scheduling form the main body of the survey. Contention-aware scheduling is used to map threads to cores, so as to avoid unnecessary competition for shared resources by balancing memory-intensive with compute-intensive threads. Cooperative resource scheduling focuses on threads that share resources within a single multithreaded application. While this approach is hampered by the difficulty of monitoring how threads share data, it is likely to become more important with the emergence of parallel algorithms.

The survey concludes with a review of scheduling in Linux and Solaris, and an informative discussion leading to a summary of the ideal scheduler.

Reviewer:  Edel Sherratt Review #: CR141105 (1307-0634)
Bookmark and Share
  Reviewer Selected
Editor Recommended
 
 
Scheduling (D.4.1 ... )
 
Would you recommend this review?
yes
no
Other reviews under "Scheduling": Date
The gradient model load balancing method
Lin F., Keller R. (ed) IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 13(1): 32-38, 1987. Type: Article
Sep 1 1987
Preemptive scheduling of a multiprocessor system with memories to minimize maximum lateness
Lai T., Sahni S. SIAM Journal on Computing 13(4): 690-704, 1984. Type: Article
Jul 1 1985
Scheduling independent tasks on uniform processors
Dobson G. SIAM Journal on Computing 13(4): 705-716, 1984. Type: Article
Apr 1 1986
more...

E-Mail This Printer-Friendly
Send Your Comments
Contact Us
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.   Copyright 1999-2024 ThinkLoud®
Terms of Use
| Privacy Policy