Adaptive thread scheduling in chip multiprocessors

Abstract

The full potential of chip multiprocessors remains unexploited due to architecture oblivious thread schedulers employed in operating systems. We introduce an adaptive cache-hierarchy-aware scheduler that tries to schedule threads in a way that inter-thread contention is minimized. A novel multi-metric scoring scheme is used which specifies L1 cache access characteristics of threads. Scheduling decisions are made based on these multi-metric scores of threads.