Event Details

Joys of Scheduling on Multicore Processors

Presenter: Dr. Alexandra Fedorova - Assistant Professor, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University (SFU)
Supervisor:

Date: Tue, September 7, 2010
Time: 14:00:00 - 15:00:00
Place: EOW 430

ABSTRACT

Abstract

On multicore processors, processing cores share hardware resources, 
such as caches, memory controllers and interconnects, and threads 
running simultaneously on different cores affect each other's 
performance. A thread scheduler can have a major impact on performance. In particular, if certain threads compete for a certain type of shared 
resource (e.g., a memory controller), the scheduler can place them such 
that they do share this resource and run more efficiently as a result.

In this talk, I will describe our research on mitigating contention for
 shared resources via scheduling. This is a challenging problem, because
 it is difficult to determine at runtime whether or not threads will hurt each other's performance. One school of thought believed that in 
order to predict the extent of contention between a group of threads, 
the scheduler must know the threads' memory reuse profiles. But these profiles are very difficult to obtain online. We discovered that 
contention can be approximated using a much simpler online metric. A 
contention-aware scheduler built as a result of our research improves 
upon the worst-case performance of the default Linux scheduler by as much as a factor of two for some applications.
 I will conclude the talk by discussing some of the on-going research in
 our group, including contention management on NUMA systems.

Biography

Dr. Alexandra Fedorova is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, Canada. She earned her PhD
 at Harvard University in 2006, where she completed a thesis on 
Operating System Scheduling for Chip Multithreaded Processors. 
Concurrently with her doctorate studies, Dr. Fedorova worked at Sun Microsystems Research Labs, where she investigated transactional memory 
and operating systems. She is the lead inventor on three US patents, 
with a few others under review. At SFU, Dr. Fedorova has co-founded the Systems, Networking and Architecture (SYNAR) research lab. Presently her
 research interests span operating systems and virtualization platforms 
for multi-core processors, with a specific focus on scheduling. Recently she started collaborating on datacenter power efficiency with several 
local companies. She has more than 20 publications in various academic 
venues. Her work is supported by Sun Microsystems, Google, Intel and Electronic Arts. She also holds two Strategic Grants from the Canadian 
government and a BCIC Natural Resources and Applied Sciences grant.

For further information, please contact:
Dr. Amirali Baniasadi
Ph.: 250 721-8613 / Email: abaniasa@ece.uvic.ca