BWS: balanced work stealing for time-sharing multicores

Running multithreaded programs in multicore systems has become a common practice for many application domains. Work stealing is a widely-adopted and effective approach for managing and scheduling the concurrent tasks of such programs. Existing work-stealing schedulers, however, are not effective when multiple applications time-share a single multicore---their management of steal-attempting threads often causes unbalanced system effects that hurt both workload throughput and fairness. In this paper, we present BWS (Balanced Work Stealing), a work-stealing scheduler for time-sharing multicore systems that leverages new, lightweight operating system support. BWS improves system throughput and fairness via two means. First, it monitors and controls the number of awake, steal-attempting threads for each application, so as to balance the costs (resources consumed in steal attempts) and benefits (available tasks get promptly stolen) of such threads. Second, a steal-attempting thread can yield its core directly to a peer thread with an unfinished task, so as to retain the core for that application and put it to better use. We have implemented a prototype of BWS based on Cilk++, a state-of-the-art work-stealing scheduler. Our performance evaluation with various sets of concurrent applications demonstrates the advantages of BWS over Cilk++, with average system throughput increased by 12.5% and average unfairness decreased from 124% to 20%.