Much of the focus of the Real-time Systems research is on resource allocation and scheduling that ensure that jobs meet their timeline guarantees. In this lecture, we will go over several papers that touch on the main challenges and tradeoffs. These include handling bursty (interactive) workloads, heterogenous traffic, parallel jobs, and multitenancy.

Basic real-time scheduling

C. L. Liu, J Layland. 1973. Scheduling algorithms for multiprogramming in a hard real-time environment. Journal of the ACM, 20 (1): 46–61.

Handling bursty traffic and hierarchical allocation

Ion Stoica, Hui Zhang, T. S. Eugene. 1997. A Hierarchical Fair Service Curve Algorithm for Link-Sharing, Real-Time and Priority Service. SIGCOMM’97.

Handling multiple types of resources

Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, Benjamin Hindman, Andy Konwinski, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica. 2011. Dominant Resource Fairness: Fair Allocation of Multiple Resource Types. NSDI’11.

Low latency schgeduling of dependent tasks

Dror G. Feitelson, Larry Rudolph. 1992. Gang Scheduling Performance Benefits for Fine-Grain Synchronization. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. 16: 306–318.

Questions

Questions are available here.