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Multicore scheduling for lightweight communicating processes
Carl G. Ritson, Adam T. Sampson, and Frederick R.M. Barnes
Science of Computer Programming, 77(6):727-740, June 2012 [doi].Abstract
Process-oriented programming is a design methodology in which software applications are constructed from communicating concurrent processes. A typical process-oriented design involves the composition of a large number of small isolated component processes. These concurrent 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. The runtime's scheduler, implemented using lock-free algorithms, automatically executes concurrent components in parallel on multicore systems. 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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@article{3210,
author = {Carl G. Ritson and Adam T. Sampson and Frederick R.M. Barnes},
title = {Multicore scheduling for lightweight communicating processes},
month = {June},
year = {2012},
pages = {727-740},
keywords = {Concurrency, Multicore, Process-oriented, Scheduling},
note = {},
doi = {10.1016/j.scico.2011.04.006},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2012/3210},
publication_type = {article},
submission_id = {12060_1336433330},
ISSN = {0167-6423},
journal = {Science of Computer Programming},
volume = {77},
number = {6},
publisher = {Elsevier},
}