Kernel-level scheduling for the nano-threads programming model
Eleftherios D. Polychronopoulos, Xavier Martorell, Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos, Jesús Labarta, Theodore S. Papatheodorou, Nacho Navarro · 1998
Multiprocessor systems are increasingly becoming the systems of choice for low and high-end servers, running such diverse tasks as number crunching, large-scale simulations, data base engines and world wide web server applications.With such diverse workloads, system utilization and throughpuf as well as execution time become important performance metrics.In this paper we present efficient kernel scheduling policies and propose a new kernel-user interface aiming at supporting efficient parallel execution in diverse workload environments.Our approach relies on support for user level threads which are used to exploit parallelism within applications, and a two-level scheduling policy which coordinates the number of resources allocated by the kernel with the number of threads generated by each application.We compare our scheduling policies with the native gang scheduling policy of the IRIX 6.4 operating system on a Silicon Graphics Ori-gin2000.Our experimental results show substantial performance gains in terms of overall workload execution times, individual application execution times, and cache performance.