The impact of operating system scheduling policies and synchronization methods of performance of parallel applications

Shared-memory multiprocessors are frequently used as compute servers with multiple parallel applications executing at the same time. In such environments, the efficiency of a parallel application can be significantly affected by the operating system scheduling policy. In this paper, we use detailed simulation studies to evaluate the performance of several different scheduling strategies, These include regular priority scheduling, coscheduling or gang scheduling, process control with processor partitioning, handoff scheduling, and affinity-based scheduling. We also explore tradeoffs between the use of busy-waiting and blocking synchronization primitives and their interactions with the scheduling strategies. Since effective use of caches is essential to achieving high performance, a key focus is on the impact of the scheduling strategies on the caching behavior of the applications.Our results show that in situations where the number of processes exceeds the number of processors, regular priority-based scheduling in conjunction with busy-waiting synchronization primitives results in extremely poor processor utilization. In such situations, use of blocking synchronization primitives can significantly improve performance. Process control and gang scheduling strategies are shown to offer the highest performance, and their performance is relatively independent of the synchronization method used. However, for applications that have sizable working sets that fit into the cache, process control performs better than gang scheduling. For the applications considered, the performance gains due to handoff scheduling and processor affinity are shown to be small.

[1]  John K. Ousterhout,et al.  Scheduling Techniques for Concurrent Systems , 1982, ICDCS.

[2]  James K. Archibald,et al.  Cache coherence protocols: evaluation using a multiprocessor simulation model , 1986, TOCS.

[3]  Helen Davis,et al.  Tango: A Multiprocessor Simulation and Tracing System , 1990 .

[4]  Anoop Gupta,et al.  COOL: a language for parallel programming , 1990 .

[5]  David L. Black.  Scheduling support for concurrency and parallelism in the Mach operating system , 1990, Computer.

[6]  Edward D. Lazowska,et al.  The Effect of Scheduling Discipline on Spin Overhead in Shared Memory Parallel Systems , 1991, IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst..

[7]  Anoop Gupta,et al.  Techniques for improving the performance of sparse matrix factorization on multiprocessor workstations , 1990, Proceedings SUPERCOMPUTING '90.

[8]  Anoop Gupta,et al.  Process control and scheduling issues for multiprogrammed shared-memory multiprocessors , 1989, SOSP '89.

[9]  Mary K. Vernon,et al.  The performance of multiprogrammed multiprocessor scheduling algorithms , 1990, SIGMETRICS '90.

[10]  J. Mcdonald,et al.  Vectorization of a particle simulation method for hypersonic rarefied flow , 1988 .

[11]  James H. Patterson,et al.  Portable Programs for Parallel Processors , 1987 .

[12]  Kenneth C. Sevcik.  Characterizations of parallelism in applications and their use in scheduling , 1989, SIGMETRICS '89.

[13]  Edsger W. Dijkstra,et al.  The structure of the “THE”-multiprogramming system , 1968, CACM.

[14]  Andrew V. Goldberg,et al.  A new approach to the maximum flow problem , 1986, STOC '86.

[15]  John Zahorjan,et al.  Processor scheduling in shared memory multiprocessors , 1990, SIGMETRICS '90.

[16]  Anoop Gupta,et al.  Design of scalable shared-memory multiprocessors: the DASH approach , 1990, Digest of Papers Compcon Spring '90. Thirty-Fifth IEEE Computer Society International Conference on Intellectual Leverage.

[17]  Larry Rudolph,et al.  Distributed hierarchical control for parallel processing , 1990, Computer.

[18]  Harold S. Stone,et al.  Footprints in the cache , 1986, SIGMETRICS '86/PERFORMANCE '86.

[19]  John K. Ousterhout.  Scheduling Techniques for Concurrebt Systems. , 1982, ICDCS 1982.

[20]  Shikharesh Majumdar,et al.  Scheduling in multiprogrammed parallel systems , 1988, SIGMETRICS 1988.

[21]  F. Baskett,et al.  The 4D-MP graphics superworkstation: computing+graphics=40 MIPS+MFLOPS and 100000 lighted polygons per second , 1988, Digest of Papers. COMPCON Spring 88 Thirty-Third IEEE Computer Society International Conference.

[22]  Lawrence C. Stewart,et al.  Firefly: a multiprocessor workstation , 1987, IEEE Trans. Computers.