Heterogeneous multi-core processors (HMP) with the same instruction set architecture (ISA) integrate complex high performance big cores with power efficient small cores on the same chip. In comparison with homogeneous architectures, HMPs have been shown to significantly increase energy efficiency. However, current techniques to exploit the energy efficiency of HMPs do not consider fair usage of resources that leads to reduced performance predictability, a longer makespan, starvation, and QoS degradation. The effect of different cluster voltage and frequency levels on fairness is another issue neglected by previous task scheduling algorithms. The present study investigates both the fairness problem and energy efficiency in HMPs. This article proposes a heterogeneous fairness-aware energy efficient framework (HFEE) that employs DVFS to meet fairness constraints and provide energy efficient scheduling. The proposed framework is implemented and evaluated on a real heterogeneous multi-core processor. The experimental results indicate that the introduced technique can significantly improve energy efficiency and fairness when compared to Linux standard scheduler and two energy efficient and fairness-aware schedulers.

This paper presents a task migration algorithm for dynamic thermal management of Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) multi-core processors. The unique features of this algorithm include: 1) considering SMT capability of processors for dynamic thermal management via task scheduling, 2) using adaptive task migration threshold, and 3) considering cores physical features. This algorithm is evaluated on a commercial SMT quad-core processor. The experimental results indicate that our technique can significantly decrease the average and peak temperature compared to Linux standard scheduler, and two well-known thermal management techniques.