Flexible architectural support for fine-grain scheduling

To make efficient use of CMPs with tens to hundreds of cores, it is often necessary to exploit fine-grain parallelism. However, managing tasks of a few thousand instructions is particularly challenging, as the runtime must ensure load balance without compromising locality and introducing small overheads. Software-only schedulers can implement various scheduling algorithms that match the characteristics of different applications and programming models, but suffer significant overheads as they synchronize and communicate task information over the deep cache hierarchy of a large-scale CMP. To reduce these costs, hardware-only schedulers like Carbon, which implement task queuing and scheduling in hardware, have been proposed. However, a hardware-only solution fixes the scheduling algorithm and leaves no room for other uses of the custom hardware. This paper presents a combined hardware-software approach to build fine-grain schedulers that retain the flexibility of software scheduler...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Daniel Sanchez, Richard M. Yoo, Christos Kozyrakis
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2010, Programming Languages, Scheduling Algorithm, Various Scheduling Algorithms, fine-grain Schedulers