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Operating system support for mitigating software scalability bottlenecks on asymmetric multicore processors

Published: 17 May 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Asymmetric multicore processors (AMP) promise higher performance per watt than their symmetric counterparts, and it is likely that future processors will integrate a few fast out-of-order cores, coupled with a large number of simpler, slow cores, all exposing the same instruction-set architecture (ISA). It is well known that one of the most effective ways to leverage the effectiveness of these systems is to use fast cores to accelerate sequential phases of parallel applications, and to use slow cores for running parallel phases. At the same time, we are not aware of any implementation of this parallelism-aware (PA) scheduling policy in an operating system. So the questions as to whether this policy can be delivered efficiently by the operating system to unmodified applications, and what the associated overheads are remain open. To answer these questions we created two different implementations of the PA policy in OpenSolaris and evaluated it on real hardware, where asymmetry was emulated via CPU frequency scaling. This paper reports our findings with regard to benefits and drawbacks of this scheduling policy.

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  • (2024)Exploiting Elasticity via OS-Runtime Cooperation to Improve CPU Utilization in Multicore Systems2024 32nd Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP)10.1109/PDP62718.2024.00014(35-43)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Flexible system software scheduling for asymmetric multicore systems with PMCSched: A case for Intel Alder LakeConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.781435:25Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
  • (2020)A novel energy-efficient scheduling model for multi-core systemsCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-020-03143-w24:2(643-666)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2020
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  1. Operating system support for mitigating software scalability bottlenecks on asymmetric multicore processors

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cover image ACM Conferences
CF '10: Proceedings of the 7th ACM international conference on Computing frontiers
May 2010
370 pages
ISBN:9781450300445
DOI:10.1145/1787275
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 17 May 2010

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Author Tags

  1. asymmetric multicore
  2. operating systems
  3. scheduling

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CF'10: Computing Frontiers Conference
May 17 - 19, 2010
Bertinoro, Italy

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CF '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 113 submissions, 27%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 273 of 785 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Exploiting Elasticity via OS-Runtime Cooperation to Improve CPU Utilization in Multicore Systems2024 32nd Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP)10.1109/PDP62718.2024.00014(35-43)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Flexible system software scheduling for asymmetric multicore systems with PMCSched: A case for Intel Alder LakeConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.781435:25Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
  • (2020)A novel energy-efficient scheduling model for multi-core systemsCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-020-03143-w24:2(643-666)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2020
  • (2018)Contention-Aware Fair Scheduling for Asymmetric Single-ISA Multicore SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2018.283641867:12(1703-1719)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
  • (2018)Exploring the Design Space of Fair Scheduling Supports for Asymmetric Multicore SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2018.279607767:8(1136-1152)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2018
  • (2018)Delivering Fairness on Asymmetric Multicore Systems via Contention-Aware SchedulingEuro-Par 2017: Parallel Processing Workshops10.1007/978-3-319-75178-8_49(610-622)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2018
  • (2017)Towards completely fair scheduling on asymmetric single-ISA multicore processorsJournal of Parallel and Distributed Computing10.1016/j.jpdc.2016.12.011102:C(115-131)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017
  • (2017)A GA based energy aware scheduler for DVFS enabled multicore systemsComputing10.1007/s00607-017-0540-299:10(955-977)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2017
  • (2017)Dynamic Load Balancing for Asymmetric Multi-core ArchitectureTask Scheduling for Multi-core and Parallel Architectures10.1007/978-981-10-6238-4_5(113-151)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2017
  • (2016)Fairness-oriented OS Scheduling Support for Multicore SystemsProceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Supercomputing10.1145/2925426.2926262(1-12)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2016
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