Why Not Deterministic?

This lesson introduces you to stride scheduling with the help of an example and concludes by comparing stride scheduling to lottery scheduling.

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You might also be wondering: why use randomness at all? As we saw above, while randomness gets us a simple (and approximately correct) scheduler, it occasionally will not deliver the exact right proportions, especially over short time scales. For this reason, Waldspurger invented stride scheduling, a deterministic fair-share scheduler“Lottery and Stride Scheduling: Flexible Proportional-Share Resource Management” by Carl A. Waldspurger. Ph.D. Thesis, MIT, 1995. The award-winning thesis of Waldspurger’s that outlines lottery and stride scheduling. If you’re thinking of writing a Ph.D. dissertation at some point, you should always have a good example around, to give you something to strive for: this is such a good one..

Stride scheduling

Stride scheduling is also straightforward. Each job in the system has a stride, which is inverse in proportion to the number of tickets it has. In the example discussed previously, with jobs A, B, and C, with 100, 50, and 250 tickets, respectively, we can compute the stride of each by dividing some large number by the number of tickets each process has been assigned. For example, if we divide 10,000 by each of those ticket values, we obtain the following stride values for A, B, and C: 100, 200, and 40. We call this value the stride of each process; every time a process runs, we will increment a counter for it (called its pass value) by its stride to track its global progress.

The scheduler then uses the stride and pass to determine which process should run next. The basic idea is simple: at any given time, pick the process to run that has the lowest pass value so far; when you run a process, increment its pass counter by its stride. A pseudocode implementation is provided by Waldspurger“Lottery and Stride Scheduling: Flexible Proportional-Share Resource Management” by Carl A. Waldspurger. Ph.D. Thesis, MIT, 1995. The award-winning thesis of Waldspurger’s that outlines lottery and stride scheduling. If you’re thinking of writing a Ph.D. dissertation at some point, you should always have a good example around, to give you something to strive for: this is such a good one.:

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