A user-level framework for scheduling within service execution environments

To support application-specific quality of service for hosted services, a client of a compute utility requires the ability to schedule the processor resources supplied to its service. We present a user-level scheduling framework that operates in tandem with a standard kernel scheduler to support user-level policies for sharing processor resources. The scheduler operates by sampling the resource consumption of processes and limiting which processes are eligible for scheduling by the kernel. We present a Unix implementation of this framework and show that it can accurately control the rate of execution of compute-bound processes, with low computational overhead, despite its user-level operation. Finally, we demonstrate the scheduler's ability to enforce differentiated qualities of service for a Web-based message board service.