SAWS: Simple and Adaptive Warp Scheduling for Improved Performance in Throughput Processors

Abstract

In this work, we address the challenge of designing an efficient warp scheduler for throughput processors by proposing SAWS (Simple and Adaptive Warp Scheduler). Differently from previous approaches which target a particular type of applications, SAWS considers several simple scheduling algorithms and tries to use the one that best fits each application or phase within an application. Through detailed simulations we demonstrate that a practical implementation of SAWS can obtain IPC values that closely match the best scheduling algorithm in each case.