source: doc/theses/thierry_delisle_PhD/comp_II/presentation.tex@ c7f9f53

\documentclass[english,aspectratio=169,svgnames,notes=hide,14pt,xcolor={dvipsnames}]{beamer}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{epic,eepic}
\usepackage{presentationstyle}

\title{The \CFA Scheduler}
\subtitle{PhD Comprehensive II Research Proposal}
\author{Thierry Delisle}
% \affil[1]{School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo}
% \affil[ ]{\textit {tdelisle@uwaterloo.ca}}

\begin{document}
%==============================
\miniframesoff
\begin{frame}[noframenumbering,plain]
        \titlepage
\end{frame}
%==============================
\section{Introduction}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}[noframenumbering]
        \tableofcontents
\end{frame}
\miniframeson
%==============================
\AtBeginSection[]{
        \miniframesoff
        \begin{frame}
        \vfill
        \centering
        \begin{beamercolorbox}[sep=8pt,center,shadow=false,rounded=false]{title}
                \usebeamerfont{title}\insertsectionhead\par%
        \end{beamercolorbox}
        \vfill
        \end{frame}
        \miniframeson
}
\section{Concurrency and \CFA}
\begin{frame}{Project}
        \begin{center}
                {\large Produce a scheduler for \CFA that is simple for programmers to understand and offers good general performance.}
        \end{center}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{\CFA}
        \CFA is a modern extension of C.
        It adds to C : overloading, constructors/destructors, polymorphism, and much more.

        ~\newline
        For this project, the relevant aspects are:
        \begin{itemize}
                \item Fast and safe system language.
                \item Threading.
                \item Manual memory management.
        \end{itemize}

\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Concurrency in \CFA}
        User Level Threading
        \begin{itemize}
                \item M:N threading.
                \item User Level Context Switching causes kernel-threads to run a different user-thread.
        \end{itemize}
        ~\newline
        Threads organized in clusters:
        \begin{itemize}
                \item Clusters have their own kernel threads.
                \item Threads in a cluster are on run on the kernel threads of that cluster.
        \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Concurrency in \CFA}
        \begin{table}
                {\resizebox{1\textwidth}{!}{\input{system.dark.pstex_t}}}
        \end{table}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Scheduling goal for \CFA}
        {\large
                \begin{center}
                        The \CFA scheduler should be \textit{viable} for any workload.
                \end{center}
        }
        ~\newline
        This implies:
        \begin{enumerate}
                \item Producing a scheduler with sufficient fairness guarantees.
                \item Handling kernel-threads running out of work.
                \item Handling blocking I/O operations.
        \end{enumerate}
\end{frame}
%==============================
\section{Scheduling in Practice}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{In the Wild}
        Schedulers found in production application generally fall into two categories:
        \newline

        \begin{itemize}
                \item Feedback Scheduling\newline
                \item Priority Scheduling (explicit or not)\newline
        \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Feedback Scheduling}
        Most operating systems based their scheduling on feedback loops.
        ~\newline

        The scheduler runs a thread and adjusts some metric to choose when to run it, e.g., least CPU time first.
        ~\newline

        Relies on the following assumptions:
        \begin{enumerate}
                \item Threads live long enough for useful feedback information to be to gathered.
                \item Threads belong to multiple users so fairness across threads is insufficient.
        \end{enumerate}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Priority Scheduling}
        \begin{center}
                {\large
                        Runs all ready threads in group \textit{A} before any ready threads in group \textit{B}.
                }
        \end{center}
        \vspace{1em}

        Explicit priorities:
        \begin{itemize}
                \item Threads given a priority at creation, e.g., Thread A has priority 1, Thread B has priority 6.
        \end{itemize}
        \vspace{0.75em}

        Implicit priorities:
        \begin{itemize}
                \item Certain threads are preferred, based on various metrics, e.g., last run, last run on this CPU.
        \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Priority Scheduling: Work-Stealing}
        Work-Stealing is a very popular strategy.
        \begin{block}{Algorithm}
                \begin{enumerate}
                        \item Each processor has a list of ready threads.
                        \item Each processor runs threads from its ready queue first.
                        \item If a processor's ready queue is empty, attempt to run threads from some other processor's ready queue.
                \end{enumerate}
        \end{block}
        ~

        Work-Stealing has implicit priorities: For a given processor, threads on it's queue have higher priority.

        Processors begin busy for long periods can mean starvation.
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Scheduling in Practice: Summary}
        \begin{columns}
                \begin{column}{0.5\textwidth}
                        \textbf{Feedback Scheduling}
                        \newline

                        \begin{itemize}
                                \item Inappropriate for short lived threads.
                                \item Overkill for cooperating threads.\newline
                        \end{itemize}
                \end{column}
                \begin{column}{0.5\textwidth}
                        \textbf{Priority Scheduling}
                        \newline

                        \begin{itemize}
                                \item Allows lasting starvation.\newline
                                \item Hard to reason about.\newline~\newline
                        \end{itemize}
                \end{column}
        \end{columns}

        ~\newline
        ~\newline
        \CFA would benefit from something different.
\end{frame}
%==============================
\section{Project: Proposal \& Details}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Central Ready-Queue}
        \CFA will have a single ready-queue per cluster.
        \newline

        The ready-queue will be sharded internally to reduce contention.
        \newline

        No strong coupling between internal queues and processors.
        \newline

        Constrasts with work-stealing which has a queue per processor.
        \newline
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Central Ready-Queue}
        \begin{table}
                {\resizebox{0.8\textwidth}{!}{\input{base.dark.pstex_t}}}
        \end{table}
        ~
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Central Ready-Queue Challenges}
        \begin{columns}
                \begin{column}{0.55\textwidth}
                        Semi-``Empty'' ready-queues means success rate of randomly guessing goes down.
                \end{column}
                \begin{column}{0.45\textwidth}
                        \begin{table}
                                {\resizebox{1\textwidth}{!}{\input{empty.dark.pstex_t}}}
                        \end{table}
                \end{column}
        \end{columns}

        Possible solutions:
        \begin{itemize}
                \item Data structure tracking the work, can be dense or sparse, global or sharded.
                \item Add bias towards certain sub-queues.
        \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Dynamic Resizing}
        Processors can be added at anytime on a cluster.
        \newline

        The array of queues needs to be adjusted in consequence.
        \newline

        Solution: Global Reader-Writer lock
        \begin{itemize}
                \item Acquire for reading for normal scheduling operations.
                \item Acquire for writing when resizing the array and creating/deleting internal queues.
        \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Idle Sleep}
        Processors which cannot find threads to run should sleep, using \texttt{pthread\_cond\_wait}, \texttt{sigwaitinfo}, etc.
        \newline

        Scheduling a thread may \textit{need} to wake sleeping processors.
        \begin{itemize}
                \item Threads can be scheduled from processors terminating or running outside the cluster.
                In this case, all processors on the cluster could be sleeping.
        \end{itemize}
        ~

        If \textit{some} processors are sleeping, waking more may be wasteful.

        A heuristic for this case is outside the scope of this project.
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Asynchronous I/O}
        \begin{itemize}
                \item I/O Operations should block user-threads rather than kernel-threads. \vspace{1cm}
                \item This requires 3 components:
                \begin{enumerate}
                        \item an OS abstraction layer over the asynchronous interface,  \vspace{0.2cm}
                        \item an event-engine to (de)multiplex the operations,  \vspace{0.2cm}
                        \item and a synchronous interface for users to use.  \vspace{0.2cm}
                \end{enumerate}
        \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Asynchronous I/O: OS Abstraction}
        \framesubtitle{\vskip0.5mm\large\texttt{select}}
        \vskip5mm

        {\large ``select() allows a program to monitor multiple file descriptors, waiting until one
       or more of the file descriptors become ``ready'' for some class of I/O operation.''}

        \hspace*\fill{\small--- Linux Programmer's Manual}

        \vskip5mm
        \begin{itemize}
                \item[+] moderate overhead per \texttt{syscall}
                \item[-] Relies on \texttt{syscall}s returning \texttt{EWOULDBLOCK}.
        \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Asynchronous I/O: OS Abstraction}
        \framesubtitle{\vskip0.5mm\large\texttt{epoll}}
        \vskip2mm

        More recent system call with a similar purpose.

        \vskip5mm
        \begin{itemize}
                \item[+] Smaller overhead per \texttt{syscall}.
                \item[+] Shown to work well for sockets.
                \item[-] Still relies on \texttt{syscall}s returning \texttt{EWOULDBLOCK}.
                \item[-] Does not support linux pipes and TTYs.
        \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Asynchronous I/O: OS Abstraction}
        \framesubtitle{\vskip0.5mm\large Kernel Threads}
        \vskip2mm

        Use a pool of kernel-threads, to which blocking calls are delegated.

        \vskip5mm
        \begin{itemize}
                \item Technique used by many existing systems, e.g., Go, libuv
                \item[+] Definitely works for all \texttt{syscall}s.
                \item[$-$] Can require many kernel threads.
        \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Asynchronous I/O: OS Abstraction}
        \framesubtitle{\vskip0.5mm\large\texttt{io\_uring}}
        \vskip2mm

        A very recent framework for asynchronous operations available in Linux 5.1 and later.
        Uses two ring buffers to submit operations and poll completions.

        \vskip5mm
        \begin{itemize}
                \item[+] Handles many \texttt{syscall}s.
                \item[+] Does \textit{not} rely on \texttt{syscall}s returning \texttt{EWOULDBLOCK}.
                \item[$-$] Requires synchronization on submission.
                \item[$-$] System call itself is serialized in the kernel.
        \end{itemize}
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Asynchronous I/O: Event Engine}
        An event engine must be built to fit the chosen OS Abstraction.
        \newline

        The engine must park user-threads until operation is completed.
        \newline

        Depending on the chosen abstraction the engine may need to serialize operation submission.
        \newline

        Throughput and latency are important metrics.
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Asynchronous I/O: The interface}
        The Asynchronous I/O needs an interface.
        \newline

        Several options to take into consideration:
        \begin{itemize}
                \item Adding to existing call interface, e.g., \texttt{read} and \texttt{cfaread}.  \vspace{0.2cm}
                \item Replacing existing call interface.  \vspace{0.2cm}
                \item True asynchronous interface, e.g., callbacks, futures.  \vspace{0.2cm}
        \end{itemize}

\end{frame}
%==============================
\section{Conclusion}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Summary}
        Runtime system and scheduling are still open topics.
        \newline
        \newline

        This work offers a novel runtime and scheduling package.
        \newline
        \newline

        Existing work only offers fragments that users must assemble themselves when possible.
\end{frame}
%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{Timeline}
        \begin{tabular}{ || m{0.1mm} m{0.75cm} m{1cm} | l }
                % \hline
                \phantom{100000cm} \phantom{100000cm} \phantom{100000cm} & {\small May Oct} & {\small 2020 2020} & Creation of the performance benchmark. \\
                \hline
                \phantom{100000cm} \phantom{100000cm} \phantom{100000cm} & {\small Nov Mar} & {\small 2020 2021} & Completion of the implementation. \\
                \hline
                \phantom{100000cm} \phantom{100000cm} \phantom{100000cm} & {\small Mar Apr} & {\small 2021 2021} & Final performance experiments. \\
                \hline
                \phantom{100000cm} \phantom{100000cm} \phantom{100000cm} & {\small May Aug} & {\small 2021 2021} & Thesis writing and defense. \\
                % \hline
        \end{tabular}
\end{frame}

%------------------------------
\begin{frame}{}
        \begin{center}
                {\large Questions?}
        \end{center}
\end{frame}
\end{document}