User-Land Work Stealing Schedulers: Towards a Standard

Multicore processors are currently hitting the market at enormous speed. Multi-processing in all its variants is seen as the way into the future of computational systems and imply parallelism for future applications. The basics of software development are changing when going parallel. One key concept to ensure scalability of today´s applications for the future is the idea of using work stealing scheduling systems to ensure load balancing, and re-writing existing software is necessary to exploit that style of programming. The numerous work stealing concepts however differ in form of implementation, interfaces and supported systems. Handling this diversity of systems makes the already complicated process of going parallel even worse. We present a simple but complete work stealing scheduler (TPI - task processing interface) as an example and formulate the requirements to a basic work stealing interface as a first step to an open standard proposal.