A scheduling selection process for energy‐efficient task execution on DVFS processors

Abstract

SummaryThe efficient execution of parallel programs with respect to execution time and energy consumption is a major concern, and often, scheduling methods are used to achieve a good performance. In this article, we consider the problem of scheduling a set of independent tasks on a parallel system with homogeneous execution units providing frequency scaling. The set of tasks has the property that the tasks exhibit a task‐specific inhomogeneous and non‐linear behavior of their specific time‐energy relation. In addition, it is assumed that execution time and energy consumption behave in a non‐linear manner with respect to frequency scaling. For the assignment of these tasks to execution units, we propose a scheduling selection process combining scheduling algorithms, which determine a task assignment, with a subsequent selection of frequency scaling, which we call schedule execution modes. This process builds a rich set of alternative schedule execution modes from which efficient (or Pareto‐optimal) schedule execution modes can be selected. Experiments are done for the SPEC CPU benchmarks. Experimental results illustrate that the enriched scheduling process leads to task assignments resulting in an efficient execution on DVFS processors.