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Past and Future Directions for Concurrent Task Scheduling

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Concurrent Objects and Beyond

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8665))

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Abstract

A wave of parallel processing research in the 1970s and 1980s developed various techniques for concurrent task scheduling, including work-stealing scheduling and lazy task creation, and various ideas for supporting speculative computing, including the sponsor model, but these ideas did not see large-scale use as long as uniprocessor clock speeds continued to increase rapidly from year to year. Now that the increase in clock speeds has slowed dramatically and multicore processors have become the answer for increasing the computing throughput of processor chips, increasing the performance of everyday applications on multicore processors by using parallelism has taken on greater importance, so concurrent task scheduling techniques are getting a second look.

Work stealing and lazy task creation have now been incorporated into a wide range of systems capable of “industrial strength” application execution, but support for speculative computing still lags behind. This paper traces these techniques from their origins to their use in present-day systems and suggests some directions for further investigation and development in the speculative computing area.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 24 Louise Road, Belmont, MA, 02478, USA

    Robert H. Halstead

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  1. Robert H. Halstead
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Gul Agha

  2. Department of Communications and Computer Engineering, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Atsushi Igarashi

  3. Department of Computer Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Naoki Kobayashi

  4. Department of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Hidehiko Masuhara

  5. Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Satoshi Matsuoka

  6. Information Technology Center, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Etsuya Shibayama

  7. Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Department of Information and Communication Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Kenjiro Taura

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Halstead, R.H. (2014). Past and Future Directions for Concurrent Task Scheduling. In: Agha, G., et al. Concurrent Objects and Beyond. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8665. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44471-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44471-9_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-44470-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-44471-9

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