GANG SCHEDULING PERFORMANCE BENEFITS FOR FINE-GRAIN SYNCHRONIZATION

Multiprogrammed multiprocessors executing fine-grain parallel programs appear to require new scheduling policies. A promising new idea is gang scheduling, where a set of threads are scheduled to execute simultaneously on a set of processors. This has the intuitive appeal of supplying the threads with an environment that is very similar to a dedicated machine. It allows the threads to interact efficiently by using busy waiting, without the risk of waiting for a thread that currently is not running. Without gang scheduling, threads have to block in order to synchronize, thus suffering the overhead of a context switch. While this is tolerable in coarse-grain computations, and might even lead to performance benefits if the threads are highly unbalanced, it causes severe performance degradation in the fine-grain case. We have developed a model to evaluate the performance of different combinations of synchronization mechanisms and scheduling policies, and validated it by an implementation on the Makbilan multiprocessor. The model leads to the conclusion that gang scheduling is required for efficient fine-grain synchronization on multiprogrammed multiprocessors. © 1992.