Brief Announcement: Parallel Depth First vs. Work Stealing Schedulers on CMP Architectures

Abstract

In chip multiprocessors (CMPs), limiting the number of off-chip cache misses is crucial for good performance. Many multithreaded programs provide opportunities for constructive cache sharing, in which concurrently scheduled threads share a largely overlapping working set. In this brief announcement, we highlight our ongoing study [4] comparing the performance of two schedulers designed for fine-grained multithreaded programs: Parallel Depth First (PDF) [2], which is designed for constructive sharing, and Work Stealing (WS) [3], which takes a more traditional approach. Overview of schedulers. In PDF, processing cores are allocated ready-to-execute program tasks such that higher scheduling priority is given to those tasks the sequential program would have executed earlier. As a result, PDF tends t