Process Scheduling for the Parallel Desktop

Abstract

Commodity hardware and software are growing increasingly more complex, with advances such as chip heterogeneity and specialization, deeper memory hierarchies, fine-grained power management, and most importantly, chip parallelism. Similarly, workloads are growing more concurrent and diverse. With this new complexity in hardware and software, process scheduling in the operating system (OS) becomes more challenging. Nevertheless, most commodity OS schedulers are based on design principles that are 30 years old. This disparity may soon lead to significant performance degradation. Most significantly, parallel architectures such as multicore chips require more than scalable OSs: parallel programs require parallel-aware scheduling. This paper posits that imminent changes in hardware and software warrant reevaluating the scheduler's policies in the commodity OS. We discuss and demonstrate the main issues that the emerging parallel desktops are raising for the OS scheduler. We propose that a new approach to scheduling is required, applying and generalizing lessons from different domain-specific scheduling algorithms, and in particular, parallel job scheduling. Future architectures can also assist the OS by providing better information on process scheduling requirements.