Mimer and Schedeval: Tools for Comparing Static Schedulers for Streaming Applications on Manycore Architectures

Scheduling algorithms published in the scientific literature are often difficult to evaluate or compare due to differences between the experimental evaluations in any two papers on the topic. Very few researchers share the details about the scheduling problem instances they use in their evaluation section, the code that allows them to transform the numbers they collect into the results and graphs they show, nor the raw data produced in their experiments. Also, many scheduling algorithms published are not tested against a real processor architecture to evaluate their efficiency in a realistic setting. In this paper, we describe Mimer, a modular evaluation tool-chain for static schedulers that enables the sharing of evaluation and analysis tools employed to elaborate scheduling papers. We propose Schedeval that integrates into Mimer to evaluate static schedules of streaming applications under throughput constraints on actual target execution platforms. We evaluate the performance of Schedeval at running streaming applications on the Intel Single-Chip Cloud computer (SCC), and we demonstrate the usefulness of our tool-chain to compare existing scheduling algorithms. We conclude that Mimer and Schedeval are useful tools to study static scheduling and to observe the behavior of streaming applications when running on many core architectures.