A Fair and Efficient Gang Scheduling Algorithm for Multicore Processors

Abstract

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The trend in multicore processors indicates that all future processors will be multicore, and hence the future cloud systems are expected to have nodes and clusters based on multicore processors. On the application front, to utilize these multicore processors, most future applications are expected to be parallel programs. Gang scheduling is a popular strategy of scheduling parallel programs on multiprocessor systems. ‘Adaptive First-Come-First-Served’ and ‘Largest-Gang-First-Served’ are most popular gang scheduling algorithms, but they are susceptible to starvation and hence high variance in response time. To address starvation, process migration mechanisms have been proposed in the literature. Migrating a process to a new processor is generally expensive, and also it does not eliminate starvation. This paper presents a starvation free gang scheduling algorithm for multicore processors without using process migration. The algorithm is simple, fair, and efficient.