An Efficient And Fair Scheduling Policy For Multiprocessor Platforms

Scheduling is a decision-making process that deals with the assignment of resources to tasks over given periods, aiming to optimize one or more objectives. Responsible for efficient distribution of the CPU time among the processes, scheduler has become an essential part of computer systems. While applications run on neighboring cores of a many-core system, they compete with each other for the shared resources (cache, memory etc.). This contention can result in great performance degradation for the applications that are concurrently executed. For this reason, treating the cores of a many-core systems as isolated and independent units is a very optimistic abstraction and can cause great problems to the objectives a scheduler tries to optimize. This paper presents a scheduler that focuses on improving the system's fairness by deciding the group of applications that will be executed together based on the progress they have performed. Results shows that the proposed scheduler achieves on average 86% fairness improvement compared to two state-of-art schedulers.