Donation of $100,000.00 from Oracle to Gilles Muller Whisper team at LIP6

Donation of $100,000.00 from Oracle to Gilles Muller (Whisper team at LIP6) on the topic of "Improving application performance down to the scheduler level", through a collaboration with Jean-Pierre Lozi from Oracle Labs.

The topic of this research is the design of a profiler that makes it possible to find out whether a bottleneck during application runtime is caused by the application itself, by suboptimal OS scheduler behavior, or by a combination of the two. The profiler will have to make it possible to understand the root cause of performance problems (e.g., which scheduling decisions led to poor performance) and to have low overhead in order to ensure the measurement itself won’t affect scheduling. We will use this profiler to better understand which kind of workloads suffer from poor scheduling, and to propose new algorithms, heuristics and/or a new design for the Linux scheduler to improve performance. Finally, this profiler will make it possible to track workload-specific scheduling bottlenecks, to understand them, and to fix them either at the application or at the scheduler level.

This project will be done by the Whisper team in cooperation with Julien Sopena from the DELYS LIP6 team.