A novel energy-efficient scheduling model for multi-core systems

Multi-core systems has evolved enormously during the last decade with the improvement in the integration technology which makes it possible to house large number of transistors on a single chip. Keeping large number of cores on a single chip results in heat dissipation, which is a serious problem and cannot be overlooked. To handle this, not only the green hardware but energy-efficient software techniques are also warranted. A scheduler allocates the jobs on the CPU cores keeping energy aspect in mind beside effective core utilization. The proposed scheduling model considers three aspects for energy optimization: applying DVFS technique at the instruction level, classifying and handling CPU-intensive and memory-intensive workload for better thermal management, and differentiating heterogeneous cores by asymmetric core characteristics for effective scheduling. The performance study of the proposed scheduler is done on various CPUs benchmark data and workload for some mathematical and computational problems. The results depict that the proposed method saves energy upto 20% over DVFS and 72.5% over non-DVFS state of the art models with an acceptable energy and performance trade-off.