Gang scheduling paradigm allows timesharing of computing nodes by multiple parallel applications and supports the coordinated context switches of these applications. It can improve system responsiveness and resource utilization. However, the memory paging overhead incurred during context switches can be expensive and may diminish the positive effects of gang scheduling. This paper investigates the reduction of paging overhead in gang scheduling environments by applying a set of adaptive paging techniques: selective page-out, aggressive page-out, adaptive page-in and background writing. Our experiments with NAS NPB2 benchmark programs show that these new adaptive paging mechanisms can reduce the job switching time significantly (up to 90%).
By: Kyung Dong Ryu, Nimish Pachapurkar, Liana Fong
Published in: RC22899 in 2003
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