Priority Scheduling for Interactive Applications
Kyle Singer, Noah Goldstein, Stefan K. Muller, Kunal Agrawal, I-Ting Angelina Lee, Umut A. Acar · 2020
Many modern parallel applications, such as desktop software and cloud-based web services, are service-oriented, long running, and perform frequent interactions with the external world (e.g., responding to user input). We want such interactive applications to provide fast response times because typically at the other end of the external interaction there is a user waiting for a response. Existing parallel platforms designed for multicore hardware do not work well for such interactive applications, because they are designed to maximize throughput (rather than responsiveness). Interactive applications may have a mixture of interactive and compute-intensive tasks occurring concurrently, and the scheduler must be able to discern and prioritize tasks so that tasks which require faster response are prioritized over background tasks.