Agent based load balancing scheme using affinity processor scheduling for multicore architectures

Abstract

Multicore architecture otherwise called as CMP has many processors packed together on a single chip utilizes hyper threading technology. The main reason for adding large amount of processor core brings massive advancements in parallel computing paradigm. The enormous performance enhancement in multicore platform injects lot of challenges to the task allocation and load balancing on the processor cores. Altogether it is a crucial part from the operating system scheduling point of view. To envisage this large computing capacity, efficient resource allocation schemes are needed. A multicore scheduler is a resource management component of a multicore operating system focuses on distributing the load of some highly loaded processor to the lightly loaded ones such that the overall performance of the system is maximized. We already proposed a hard-soft processor affinity scheduling algorithm that promises in minimizing the average waiting time of the non critical tasks in the centralized queue and avoids the context switching of critical tasks. In this paper we are incorporating the agent based load balancing scheme for the multicore processor using the hard-soft processor affinity scheduling algorithm. Since we use the actual round robin scheduling for non critical tasks and due to soft affinity the load balancing is done automatically for non critical tasks. We actually modified and simulated the linux 2.6.11 kernel process scheduler to incorporate the hard-soft affinity processor scheduling concept. Our load balancing performance is depicted with respect to different load balancing algorithms and we could realize the performance improvement in terms of response time against the various homogeneous and heterogeneous load conditions. The results also shows the comparison of our agent based load balancing algorithm against the traditional static and dynamic sender, receiver initiated load balancing algorithms.