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E-OSched: a load balancing scheduler for heterogeneous multicores

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Abstract

The contemporary multicore era has adhered to the heterogeneous computing devices as one of the proficient platforms to execute compute-intensive applications. These heterogeneous devices are based on CPUs and GPUs. OpenCL is deemed as one of the industry standards to program heterogeneous machines. The conventional application scheduling mechanisms allocate most of the applications to GPUs while leaving CPU device underutilized. This underutilization of slower devices (such as CPU) often originates the sub-optimal performance of data-parallel applications in terms of load balance, execution time, and throughput. Moreover, multiple scheduled applications on a heterogeneous system further aggravate the problem of performance inefficiency. This paper is an attempt to evade the aforementioned deficiencies via initiating a novel scheduling strategy named OSched. An enhancement to the OSched named E-OSched is also part of this study. The OSched performs the resource-aware assignment of jobs to both CPUs and GPUs while ensuring a balanced load. The load balancing is achieved via contemplation on computational requirements of jobs and computing potential of a device. The load-balanced execution is beneficiary in terms of lower execution time, higher throughput, and improved utilization. The E-OSched reduces the magnitude of the main memory contention during concurrent job execution phase. The mathematical model of the proposed algorithms is evaluated by comparison of simulation results with different state-of-the-art scheduling heuristics. The results revealed that the proposed E-OSched has performed significantly well than the state-of-the-art scheduling heuristics by obtaining up to 8.09% improved execution time and up to 7.07% better throughput.

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Notes

  1. In this research job terminology is used to define an OpenCL application that consists of a host program and kernel functions.

  2. FLOPS = Floating Point Operations Per Second.

  3. https://www.top500.org/lists/2017/11/.

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Acknowledgements

The Austrian Promotion Agency (FFG) partially funded this work as part of the project 848448 “Tiroler Cloud”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Capital University of Science and Technology, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

    Yasir Noman Khalid, Muhammad Aleem, Muhammad Azhar Iqbal & Muhammad Arshad Islam

  2. Alpen-Adria-Universität, 9020, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Radu Prodan

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  1. Yasir Noman Khalid
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Correspondence to Muhammad Aleem.

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Khalid, Y.N., Aleem, M., Prodan, R. et al. E-OSched: a load balancing scheduler for heterogeneous multicores. J Supercomput 74, 5399–5431 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2435-1

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