Synchronization-Aware Virtual Machine Scheduling for Parallel Applications in Xen

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a synchronization-aware VM scheduler for parallel applications in Xen. The proposed scheduler prevents threads from waiting for a significant amount of time during synchronization. For this purpose, we propose an identification scheme that can identify the threads that have awaited other threads for a long time. In this scheme, a detection module that can infer the internal status of guest OSs was developed. We also present a scheduling policy that can accelerate bottlenecks of concurrent VMs. We implemented our VM scheduler in the recent Xen hypervisor with para-virtualized Linux-based operating systems. We show that our approach can improve the performance of concurrent VMs by up to 43% as compared to the credit scheduler.