Thread-level priority assignment in global multiprocessor scheduling for parallel tasks

Abstract

The advent of multi- and many-core processors offers enormous performance potential for parallel tasks that exhibit suffcient intra-task thread-level parallelism. With a growth of novel parallel programming models (e.g., OpenMP, MapReduce), scheduling parallel tasks in the real-time context has received an increasing attention in the recent past. While most studies focused on schedulability analysis under some well-known scheduling algorithms designed for sequential tasks, little work has been introduced to design new scheduling policies that accommodate the features of parallel tasks, such as their multi-threaded structure. Motivated by this, we refine real-time scheduling algorithm categories according to the basic unit of scheduling and propose a new priority assignment method for global task-wide thread-level fixed-priority scheduling of parallel task systems. Our evaluation results show that a finer-grained, thread-level fixed-priority assignment, when properly assigned, significantly improves schedulability, compared to a coarser-grained, task-level assignment.