Addressing characterization methods for memory contention aware co-scheduling

The ability to precisely predict how memory contention degrades performance when co-scheduling programs is critical for reaching high performance levels in cluster, grid and cloud environments. In this paper we present an overview and compare the performance of state-of-the-art characterization methods for memory aware (co-)scheduling. We evaluate the prediction accuracy and co-scheduling performance of four methods: one slowdown-based, two cache-contention based and one based on memory bandwidth usage. Both our regression analysis and scheduling simulations find that the slowdown based method, represented by Memgen, performs better than the other methods. The linear correlation coefficient $$R^2$$R2 of Memgen’s prediction is 0.890. Memgen’s preferred schedules reached 99.53 % of the obtainable performance on average. Also, the memory bandwidth usage method performed almost as well as the slowdown based method. Furthermore, while most prior work promote characterization based on cache miss rate we found it to be on par with random scheduling of programs and highly unreliable.