Design tradeoffs for process scheduling in shared memory multiprocessor systems

A potential system software bottleneck is demonstrated in designing an efficient process scheduling method for multiprocessor systems with shared-memory communication mechanism. The process scheduling overhead is considered. The main contribution of this work is to find the design tradeoffs between monitor bottleneck due to scheduling overhead and low process utilization due to load imbalancing. Choosing an optimum number of scheduling monitors is the key to resolve the bottlenecks. Because of the excessive number of memory requests generated by the dynamic monitor selection method, the use of the fixed monitor selection method is recommended. An analytic estimation provides a lower bound in determining the optimum number of monitors. Hill-climbing simulation is then used to find the optimum number of monitors