Task Activity Vectors: A New Metric for Temperature-Aware Scheduling

Non-uniform utilization of functional units in combination with hardware mechanisms such as clock gating leads to different power consumptions in different parts of a processor chip. This in turn leads to non-uniform temperature distributions and problematic local hotspots, depending on the characteristics of the currently running task. The operating system's scheduler, responsible for deciding which task to run at what time, can influence temperature distribution. Our work investigates what the operating system can do to alleviate the problem of hotspots. We propose task activity vectors describing which functional units a task uses to what degree. With the knowledge provided by these vectors, the scheduler can schedule tasks using different units successively, distribute tasks using a particular unit excessively over the system's processors, or mix tasks using different units on a SMT processor. We implemented several vector-based scheduling strategies for Linux. Our evaluations show that vector-based scheduling considerably reduces hotspots.