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Sticky-ERfair: a task-processor affinity aware proportional fair scheduler

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Abstract

A drawback of current proportional fair schedulers is that they ignore task-to-processor mutual affinities, thereby causing frequent inter-processor task migrations and cache misses. This paper presents the Sticky-ERfair Scheduler, an Early-Release Fair (ERfair) scheduler that attempts to minimize task migrations and preemptions. Given any processor V i , Sticky-ERfair allocates to it the most recently executed ready task that previously executed on V i (thus restricting migrations and preemptions) in such a way that this allocation does not cause any ERfairness violations in the system at any time during the schedule length. Experimental results reveal that Sticky-ERfair can achieve upto over 40 times reduction both in the number of migrations and preemptions suffered with respect to Basic-ERfair (for a set of 25 to 100 tasks running on 2 to 10 processors) while simultaneously guaranteeing ERfairness at each time slot.

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Correspondence to Arnab Sarkar.

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Sarkar, A., Ghose, S. & Chakrabarti, P.P. Sticky-ERfair: a task-processor affinity aware proportional fair scheduler. Real-Time Syst 47, 356–377 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-011-9120-2

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