Comparing gang scheduling with dynamic space sharing on symmetric multiprocessors using automatic self-allocating threads (ASAT)

The work considers the best way to handle a diverse mix of multi-threaded and single-threaded jobs running on a single symmetric parallel processing system. The traditional approaches to this problem are free scheduling, gang scheduling, or space sharing. The paper examines a less common technique called dynamic space sharing. One approach to dynamic space sharing, automatic self allocating threads (ASAT), is compared to all of the traditional approaches to scheduling a mixed load of jobs. Performance results for ASAT scheduling, gang scheduling, and free scheduling are presented. ASAT scheduling is shown to be the superior approach to mixing multi-threaded work with single threaded work.