Dynamic Workload Characterization for Power Efcient Scheduling on CMP Systems

Runtime characteristics of individual threads (such as IPC, cache usage, etc.) are a critical factor in making efcient scheduling de-cisions in modern chip-multiprocessor systems. They provide key insights into how threads interact when they share processor re-sources, and affect the overall system power and performance ef-ciency. In this paper, we propose and implement mechanisms and policies for a commercial OS scheduler and load balancer which incorporates thread characteristics, and show that it results in im-provements of up to 30 % in performance per watt