Cooperative multitasking for heterogeneous accelerators in the Linux Completely Fair Scheduler

This paper presents an extension of the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) to support cooperative multitasking with time-sharing for heterogeneous processing elements in Linux. We extend the kernel to be aware of accelerators, hold different run queues for these components and perform scheduling decisions using application provided meta information and a fairness measure. Our additional programming model allows the integration of checkpoints into applications, which permits the preemption and subsequent migration of applications between accelerators. We show that cooperative multitasking is possible on heterogeneous systems and that it increases application performance and system utilization.