MLP Aware Scheduling Techniques in Multithreaded Processors

Abstract: Major chip manufacturers have all introduced Multithreaded processors. These processors are used for running a variety of workloads. Efficient resource utilization is an important design aspect in such processors. Particularly, it is important to take advantage of available memory-level parallelism(MLP). In this paper I propose a MLP aware operating system (OS) scheduling algorithm for Multithreaded Multi-core processors. By observing the MLP available in each thread and by balancing it with available MLP resources in the system the OS will come up with a new schedule of threads for the next quantum that could potentially improve overall performance. We do a qualitative comparison of our solution with other hardware and software techniques. This work can be extended by doing a quantitative evaluation and by further refining the scheduling optimization.