Application of secretary algorithm to dynamic load balancing in user-space on multicore systems

Abstract

APPLICATION OF SECRETARY ALGORITHM TO DYNAMIC LOAD BALANCING IN USER-SPACE ON MULTICORE SYSTEMS by Kyoung-Hwan YunIn recent years, multicore processors have been so prevalent in many types of systems and are now widely used even in commodities for a wide range of applications.Although multicore processors are clearly a popular hardware solution to problems that were not possible with traditional single-core processors, taking advantage of them are inevitably met by software challenges. As Amdahl's law puts it, the performance gain is limited by the percentage of the software that cannot be run in parallel on multiple cores.Even when an application is "embarrassingly" parallelized by a careful design of algorithm and implementation, load balancing of tasks across different cores is a very important and critical aspect in utilizing a multicore system as close to its fullest potential as possible.In this paper, we investigate how a solution to a cardinal payoff variant of the secretary problem can be applied to a proactive, decentralized, dynamic load balancing technique in user-space to assist single program, multiple data (SPMD) applications in multiprogrammed environment so that all tasks can make roughly equal progress distributed over all cores. We examine how this method compares with the default Linux