Improving Resource Utilization Through Demand Aware Process Scheduling

Traditional process scheduling in the operating system focuses on high CPU utilization while achieving fairness among the processes. However, this can lead to an inefficient usage of other hardware resources, e.g., the caches, which have limited capacity and is a scarce resource on most systems. This paper extends a traditional operating system scheduler to schedule processes more efficiently against hardware resources. Through the introduction of a new concept, a progress period, which models the variation of resource access characteristics during application execution, our scheduling extension dynamically monitors the changes in resource access behavior of each process being scheduled, tracks their collective usage of hardware resources, and schedules the processes to decrease overall system power consumption without compromising performance. Testing this scheduling system on programs on an Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2420 CPU with twelve kernels from the BLAS suite and five applications from the SPLASH-2 benchmark suite yielded a 48% maximum decrease in system energy consumption (average 12%), and a 1.88x maximum increase in application performance (average 1.16x).