A shared cache-aware Task scheduling strategy for multi-core systems

Abstract

In the past few years, multi-core processors incorporating four, six, eight, or more cores on a single die have become ubiquitous. Those cores, having their own private caches, often share a higher level cache memory, which leads to compete among different tasks. This can seriously affect the average performance of multi-core systems as the probability of cache hit could be lowered. In realizing this, we study the problem of scheduling bag-of-tasks (BoT) applications with shared cache constraint on multi-core systems. We first use cache space isolation techniques to divide shared caches into partitions. Then, we give a motivational example and outline the shared cache aware scheduling problem of multi-core systems. Finally, to provide an optimum solution for this problem, we propose a heuristic shared cache contention aware scheduling (SCAS) algorithm on multi-core systems. Our extensive simulation performance evaluation study clearly demonstrate that our proposed SCAS algorithm outperforms the existing traditional scheduling algorithm Min-min and the modified algorithm MSCAS in terms of schedule length and average response time.