Reinventing scheduling for multicore systems

  • Authors:
  • Silas Boyd-Wickizer;Robert Morris;M. Frans Kaashoek

  • Affiliations:
  • MIT;MIT;MIT

  • Venue:
  • HotOS'09 Proceedings of the 12th conference on Hot topics in operating systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

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.