Adaptive Scheduling and Overhead Tuning for Deadline Constrained Computations

The growing popularity of grid and cloud computing has led to a renewed interest in resource control and coordination. The Actor model offers a convenient way for scheduling computations' access to resources by way of scheduling of the actor threads, however, efficient Actor implementations do not use a thread for each actor. This paper presents our work on integrating mechanisms for deadline assurance into an optimized implementation of Actors. We achieve this by using deadline-driven adaptive scheduling, which prioritizes individual message deliveries and method executions involved in a distributed computation. Additionally, a tuner dynamically balances the overhead of the control mechanisms against the extent of control exercised. Experiments shows that the approach offers effective support for timeliness requirements (for multimedia QoS, for example) at the cost of a relatively modest and adjustable overhead.