Efficient program scheduling for heterogeneous multi-core processors

Abstract

Heterogeneous multicore processors promise high execution efficiency under diverse workloads, and program scheduling is critical in exploiting this efficiency. This paper presents a novel method to leverage the inherent characteristics of a program for scheduling decisions in heterogeneous multicore processors. The proposed method projects the core's configuration and the program's resource demand to a unified multi-dimensional space, and uses weighted Euclidean distance between these two to guide the program scheduling. The experimental results show that on average, this distance based scheduling heuristic achieves 24.5% reduction in energy delay product, 6.1% reduction in energy, and 9.1% improvement in throughput when compared with traditional hardware oblivious scheduling algorithm.