Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Grants with Industry

• Oracle, 2018-2019, 100 000 dollars. Operating system schedulers are often a performance bottleneck on multicore architectures because in order to scale, schedulers cannot make optimal decisions and instead have to rely on heuristics. Detecting that performance degradation comes from the scheduler level is extremely difficult because the issue has not been recognized until recently, and with traditional profilers, both the application and the scheduler affect the monitored metrics in the same way.

  The first objective of this project is to produce a profiler that makes it possible to find out whether a bottleneck during application runtime is caused by the application itself, by suboptimal OS scheduler behavior, or by a combination of the two. It will require understanding, analyzing and classifying performance bottlenecks that are caused by schedulers, and devising ways to detect them and to provide enough information for the user to understand the root cause of the issue. Following this, the second objective of this project is to use the profiler to better understand which kinds of workloads suffer from poor scheduling, and to propose new algorithms, heuristics and/or a new scheduler design that will improve the situation. Finally, the third contribution will be a methodology that makes it possible to track scheduling bottlenecks in a specific workload using the profiler, to understand them, and to fix them either at the application or at the scheduler level. We believe that the combination of these three contributions will make it possible to fully harness the power of multicore architectures for any workload.