The use of control theory in the design and implementation of computing systems capable of adapting themselves is still not a common practice, although the research has been ongoing for a while. This is partially due to some limitations and probably also to the difficulties in developing computing system models that are suitable for control purposes. In this paper we use a methodology that was proven successful - the definition of equations to model the phenomenon of interest rather than the system in its whole complexity and the subsequent synthesis of a regulator to control the modeled phenomenon - to address a single problem. Said problem is resource allocation, limiting our scope here to the distribution of the CPUs to running applications in an operating system. Intuitively, some complications arise due to the limited amount of the considered resource. Multiple solutions to rescale the number of cores assigned to each application when the demand is not feasible are proposed and implemented in the Linux operating system by means of useful tools and libraries. Simulations and experimental results support the analysis.
Control-theoretical CPU Allocation: Design and Implementation with Feedback Control
MAGGIO, MARTINA;LEVA, ALBERTO
2011-01-01
Abstract
The use of control theory in the design and implementation of computing systems capable of adapting themselves is still not a common practice, although the research has been ongoing for a while. This is partially due to some limitations and probably also to the difficulties in developing computing system models that are suitable for control purposes. In this paper we use a methodology that was proven successful - the definition of equations to model the phenomenon of interest rather than the system in its whole complexity and the subsequent synthesis of a regulator to control the modeled phenomenon - to address a single problem. Said problem is resource allocation, limiting our scope here to the distribution of the CPUs to running applications in an operating system. Intuitively, some complications arise due to the limited amount of the considered resource. Multiple solutions to rescale the number of cores assigned to each application when the demand is not feasible are proposed and implemented in the Linux operating system by means of useful tools and libraries. Simulations and experimental results support the analysis.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.