School of Computing

Multicore Scheduling for Lightweight Communicating Processes

Carl G. Ritson, Adam T. Sampson, and Frederick R. M. Barnes

In John Field and Vasco Thudichum Vasconcelos, editors, Coordination Models and Languages, 11th International Conference, COORDINATION 2009, Lisboa, Portugal, June 9-12, 2009. Proceedings, volume 5521 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 163-183. Springer, June 2009.

Abstract

Process-oriented programming is a design methodology in which software applications are constructed from communicating concurrent processes. A process-oriented design is typically composed of a large number of small isolated concurrent components. These components allow for the scalable parallel execution of the resulting application on both shared-memory and distributed-memory architectures. In this paper we present a runtime designed to support process-oriented programming by providing lightweight processes and communication primitives. Our run-time scheduler, implemented using lock-free algorithms, automatically executes concurrent components in parallel on multicore systems. Run-time heuristics dynamically group processes into cache-affine work units based on communication patterns. Work units are then distributed via wait-free work-stealing. Initial performance analysis shows that, using the algorithms presented in this paper, process-oriented software can execute with an efficiency approaching that of optimised sequential and coarse-grain threaded designs.

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Bibtex Record

@inproceedings{2928,
author = {Carl G. Ritson and Adam T. Sampson and Frederick R. M. Barnes},
title = {{M}ulticore {S}cheduling for {L}ightweight {C}ommunicating {P}rocesses},
month = {June},
year = {2009},
pages = {163--183},
keywords = {},
note = {},
doi = {},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2009/2928},
    publication_type = {inproceedings},
    submission_id = {8269_1245420277},
    ISBN = {978-3-642-02052-0},
    booktitle = {Coordination Models and Languages, 11th International Conference, COORDINATION 2009, Lisboa, Portugal, June 9-12, 2009. Proceedings},
    editor = {John Field and Vasco Thudichum Vasconcelos},
    volume = {5521},
    series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
    publisher = {Springer},
    ISSN = {0302-9743},
    refereed = {yes},
}

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Last Updated: 13/07/2009 12:00