Abstract
The use of heterogeneous multicore processors is getting extremely common, and those that comprise reconfigurable logic are becoming an attractive alternative. However, to leverage them as much as possible to speed up applications, an effective scheduler, which can adequately distribute threads to cores with different processing capabilities, is required. Therefore, this work evaluates the implementation of three distinct scheduling approaches aiming at a reconfigurable heterogeneous architecture: a static algorithm that allocates the threads on the first free core, where they will run during the entire execution; an Instruction Count (IC) Driven scheduler, which reallocates threads during synchronization points accordingly to their instruction count; and an Oracle scheduler, which is capable of deciding the best thread allocation possible. The goal is to determine the necessity of scheduling algorithms and the potential of reconfigurable heterogeneous architectures. We show that a static scheduler might be used with minimal loss (0.01 %) in performance when applications have high load balancing between threads. For unbalanced applications, the static scheduler can reach only 40 % of the Oracle’s performance. On the other hand, the dynamic scheduler varies from 97 % to 35 % of the Oracle’s performance in similar conditions.
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Souza, J.D., Cachola, J.V.G., Carro, L., Rutzig, M.B., Beck, A.C.S. (2016). Evaluating Schedulers in a Reconfigurable Multicore Heterogeneous System. In: Bonato, V., Bouganis, C., Gorgon, M. (eds) Applied Reconfigurable Computing. ARC 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9625. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30481-6_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30481-6_21
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