OS Support for Load Scheduling on Accelerator-based Heterogeneous Systems

The involvement of accelerators is becoming widespread in the field of heterogeneous processing, performing computation tasks through a wide range of applications. With the advent of the various computing architectures existing currently, the need for a system-wide multitasking environment is increasing. Therefore, we present an OpenCL-based scheduler that is designed as a multi-user computing environment to make use of the full potential of available resources while running as a daemon. Multiple tasks can be issued by means of a C++ API that relies on the OpenCL C++ wrapper. At this point, the daemon takes over the control immediately and performs load scheduling. Due to its implementation, our approach can be easily applicable to a common OS. We validate our method through extensive experiments deploying a set of applications, which show that the low scheduling costs remain constant in total over a wide range of input size. Besides the different CPUs, a variety of modern GPU and other accelerator architectures are used in the experiments.