Commodity parallel computers are no longer a technology
predicted for some indistinct future: they are becoming
ubiquitous. In the absence of significant advances in clock
speed, chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) and symmetric multithreading
(SMT) are the modern workhorses that keep
Moore's Law still relevant.
On the software side, we are starting to observe the
adaptation of some codes to the new commodity parallel
hardware. While in the past, only complex professional
codes ran on parallel computers, the commoditization of
parallel computers is opening the door for many desktop
applications to benefit from parallelization. We expect this
software trend to continue, since the only apparent way of
obtaining additional performance from the hardware will
be through parallelization.
Based on the premise that the average desktop workload
is growing more parallel and complex, this paper asks
the question: Are current desktop operating systems appropriate
for these trends? Specifically, we are interested
in parallel process scheduling, which has been a topic of
significant study in the supercomputing community, but so
far little of this research has trickled down to the desktop.
In this paper, we demonstrate, using several case studies,
that contemporary general-purpose operating systems
are inadequate for the emerging parallel desktop workloads.
We suggest that schedulers designed with an understanding
of the requirements of all process classes and
their mixes, as well the abilities of the underlying architecture,
might be the solution to this inadequacy.