Reinventing Scheduling for Multicore Systems

High performance on multicore processors requires that schedulers be reinvented. Traditional schedulers focus on keeping execution units busy by assigning each core a thread to run. Schedulers ought to focus, however, on high utilization of on-chip memory, rather than of execution cores, to reduce the impact of expensive DRAM and remote cache accesses. A challenge in achieving good use of on-chip memory is that the memory is split up among the cores in the form of many small caches. This paper argues for a form of scheduling that assigns each object and its operations to a specific core, moving a thread among the cores as it uses different objects.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: HOTOS
• Authors: Silas Boyd-Wickizer, Robert Morris, M. Frans Kaashoek
• Keywords: Execution Cores, HOTOS 2009, On-chip Memory, Operating System, Traditional Schedulers