Coscheduling based on runtime identification of activity working sets

Abstract

This paper introduces a method for runtime identification of sets of interacting activities ("working sets") with the purpose of coscheduling them, i.e., scheduling them so that all the activities in the set execute simultaneously on distinct processors. The identification is done by monitoring access rates to shared communication objects: activities that access the same objects at a high rate thereby interact frequently, and therefore would benefit from coscheduling. Simulation results show that coscheduling with our runtime identification scheme can give better performance than uncoordinated scheduling based on a single global activity queue. The finer-grained the interactions among the activities in a working set, the better the performance differential. Moreover, coscheduling based on automatic runtime identification achieves about the same performance as coscheduling based on manual identification of working sets by the programmer. © 1995 Plenum Publishing Corporation.