SMART: Scheduling for Multimedia And Real-Time

Network Computing Laboratory, Columbia University

SMART: SCHEDULING FOR MULTIMEDIA AND REAL-TIME

Interactive multimedia applications are becoming ubiquitous. These applications often have real-time requirements that are very different from conventional interactive and batch applications that have been the mainstay of the general-purpose computing environment. To support these applications effectively together with conventional applications, effective resource management mechanisms and policies must be developed.

As a first step in addressing these issues, we have created SMART, a Scheduler for Multimedia And Real-Time applications. SMART explicitly supports the time constraints of applications with real-time requirements, and provides dynamic feedback to these applications to allow them to adapt their performance based on the availability of processor cycles. It is unique in its ability to make efficient use of processor cycles in meeting real-time requirements under a dynamically varying system load, even in the absence of admission control policies when the system is overloaded. In addition, the support for applications with real-time requirements is integrated with the support for applications without real-time requirements. This allows SMART to provide uniform controls that allow users to prioritize or proportionally allocate processor cycles across all applications, regardless of whether or not they have real-time requirements. We have implemented SMART in a commercial operating system and measured its performance against other schedulers in executing applications with and without real-time requirements, including continuous media, interactive, and batch applications. Our results demonstrate SMART's ability to provide superior performance for multimedia applications.

More Information:

Bogdan Caprita, Wong Chun Chan, Jason Nieh, Clifford Stein, and Haoqiang Zheng, "Group Ratio Round-Robin: O(1) Proportional Share Scheduling for Uniprocessor and Multiprocessor Systems", Proceedings of the 2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Anaheim, CA, April 10-15, 2005, pp. 337-352.
Shailabh Nagar, Rik Van Riel, Hubertus Franke, Chandra Seetharaman, Vivek Kashyap, and Haoqiang Zheng, "Improve Linux Resource Control Using CKRM", Ottawa Linux Symposium 2004 (OLS 04), Ottawa, Canada, July 21-24, 2004.
Bogdan Caprita, Wong Chun Chan, Jason Nieh, Clifford Stein, and Haoqiang Zheng, "Group Ratio Round-Robin: O(1) Proportional Share Scheduling for Uniprocessor and Multiprocessor Systems", Technical Report CUCS-028-04, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, July 2004.
Wong Chun Chan, "Group Ratio Round-Robin: An O(1) Proportional Share Scheduler", M.S. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, June 2004.
Hubertus Franke, Shailabh Nagar, Chandra Seetharaman, Vivek Kashyap, Haoqiang Zheng, and Jiantao Kong, "Enabling Autonomic Workload Management in Linux", Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2004), New York, NY, May 17-19, 2004, pp. 314-315.
Jason Nieh and Monica S. Lam, "A SMART Scheduler for Multimedia Applications", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 21(2), May 2003, pp. 117-163.
Jason Nieh and Monica S. Lam, "The Design, Implementation and Evaluation of SMART: A Scheduler for Multimedia Applications", Readings in Multimedia Computing and Networking, edited by Kevin Jeffay and HongJiang Zhang, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2002, pp. 506-519.
Jason Nieh, Chris Vaill, and Hua Zhong, "Virtual-Time Round-Robin: An O(1) Proportional Share Scheduler", Proceedings of the 2001 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Boston, MA, June 25-30, 2001, pp. 245-259.
Jason Nieh, Chris Vaill, and Hua Zhong, "Virtual-Time Round-Robin: An O(1) Proportional Share Scheduler", NMADS-3: NYC Metro Area Distributed Systems, New York, NY, April 13, 2001.
Jason Nieh and S. Jae Yang, "Measuring the Multimedia Performance of Server-Based Computing", Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video, Chapel Hill, NC, June 26-28, 2000, pp. 55-64.
Jason Nieh, "The Design, Implementation and Evaluation of SMART: A Scheduler for Multimedia Applications", Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, June 1999.
Jason Nieh and Monica S. Lam, "Multimedia on Multiprocessors: Where's the OS When You Really Need It?", Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video, Cambridge, UK, July 8-10, 1998, pp. 103-106.
Jason Nieh and Monica S. Lam, "The Design, Implementation and Evaluation of SMART: A Scheduler for Multimedia Applications", Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Saint-Malo, France, October 5-8, 1997, pp. 184-197. (Also available in HTML.)
Jason Nieh and Monica S. Lam, "SMART UNIX SVR4 Support for Multimedia Applications", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, June 3-6, 1997, pp. 404-414.
Jason Nieh and Monica S. Lam, "The Design, Implementation and Evaluation of SMART: A Scheduler for Multimedia Applications", Technical Report CSL-TR-97-721, Computer Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, April 1997.
Jason Nieh and Monica S. Lam, "The SMART Scheduler", Project Technical Report SML-96-0213, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, July 1996.
Jason Nieh and Monica S. Lam, "The Design of SMART: A Scheduler for Multimedia Applications", Technical Report CSL-TR-96-697, Computer Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, June 1996.
Jason Nieh and Monica S. Lam, "SMART: A Processor Scheduler for Multimedia Applications", Abstract in Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Copper Mountain, CO, December 3-5, 1995, p. 233.
Jason Nieh and Monica S. Lam, "Integrated Processor Scheduling for Multimedia", Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video, Durham, NH, April 18-22, 1995, pp. 215-218.
Jason Nieh, Monica S. Lam, and J. Duane Northcutt, "A Practical Unified Approach to Processor Scheduling", Project Technical Report SML-94-0488, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, December 1994.
Jason Nieh, James G. Hanko, J. Duane Northcutt, and Gerard A. Wall, "SVR4 UNIX Scheduler Unacceptable for Multimedia Applications", Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video, Lancaster, UK, November 3-5, 1993, pp. 35-48.