Context-Aware Scheduler: Avoiding Unfavorable Scheduling to Improve Virtual Machine Performance

October 7, 2008
Witty Srisa-an | University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Modern Virtual Machines (VMs) generate rich runtime information that can often be used to perform self-optimization such as adaptive compilation. However, such valuable information has rarely been used by the underlying operating systems to create more optimized execution environments for applications running on these VMs. In this talk, I will report early results from our research to design OS schedulers that try to make favorable scheduling decisions to improve the overall performance of commercial application servers. The focus of my talk will be on how we make our schedulers (i) cognizant of allocation patterns and heap usage to increase garbage collection efficiency; and (ii) cognizant of lock usage to reduce occurrences of lock contention and increase execution parallelism.

Speaker Details

Witty Srisa-an is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has been actively conducting research in the systems area that addresses high-priority issues facing today’s large multithreaded software systems. His research leverages programming semantics and application-dependent-runtime behaviors to introduce a family of algorithms, optimizations, and adaptation techniques designed to make runtime systems such as garbage collection more efficient. His research work is characterized by a rich focus across the entire computer system layers: applications, programming languages, virtual machines, operating systems, and computer architecture. His most recent work on memory management and context aware kernel has been funded by NSF, Microsoft, Altera, and Stretch. Dr. Srisa-an received Ph.D. in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology in 2002.