Three Processor Allocation Approaches towards EDF Scheduling for Performance Asymmetric Multiprocessors

Abstract

With the rapid development of high-performance computing and parallel computing technology, by virtue of its cost-effectiveness, strong scalability, and easy programming, the multiprocessor system has gradually become the mainstream computing platform. Meanwhile, a growing number of researchers pay attention to the performance of multiprocessor systems, especially the task scheduling problem, which has an important impact on the system performance. Most of the current research works on task scheduling algorithms are based on the homogeneous computing environment. On the contrary, research works focusing on more complex performance asymmetric multiprocessor environments still remain rare. In this paper, we compare the effects of three earliest deadline first algorithms under different processor allocation strategies on performance asymmetric multiprocessors. We propose an efficient schedulability analysis for an allocation strategy that assigns high-priority tasks to the slowest idle processor. Experimental results show that the strategy of allocating processors with optimum speeds for high-priority tasks can schedule more task sets than the other two allocation strategies. The strategy that prioritizes the slowest processors for high-priority tasks has the smallest number of task migrations, and the strategy has the highest effective processor utilization.