Modern schedulers look at the time a process runs on a CPU core. Yet we've passed the days when the CPU core was the resource that was most valuable on the machine. Modern process schedulers are going to need to charge programs based on how much of the I/O bus they consumer during their quantum, not just based on the time they run on a core. Modernizing schedulers to deal with these new realities will ensure the fundamental fairness of resource allocation remains intact into the manycore era.

Our researchers have been analyzing this problem and are designing the prototype scheduler to implement these policies. We are focusing on the challenge of collecting information about these types of I/O operations in a way that doesn't degrade system performance.