Co-scheduling tasks on multi-core heterogeneous systems: An energy-aware perspective

Single-ISA heterogeneous multi-core processors trade-off power with performance; however, threads that co-run on shared resources suffer from resource contention, which induces performance degradation and energy inefficiency. The authors introduce a novel approach to optimise the co-scheduling of multi-threaded applications on heterogeneous processors. The approach is based on the concept of stakes function, which represents the trade-off between isolation and sharing of resources. The authors also develop a co-scheduling algorithm that use stakes functions to optimise resource usage while mitigating resource contention, thus improving performance and energy efficiency. They validated the approach using applications from the Princeton Application Repository for Shared-Memory Computers (PARSEC) benchmark suite, obtaining up to 12.88% performance speed-up, 13.65% energy speed-up and 28.29% energy delay speed-up with respect to the standard Linux heterogeneous multi-processing scheduler.