User-based resource scheduling for multi-user surface computing systems

With technical advances in surface computing, surface computing devices such as tabletops support multi-user environments where multiple users run individual applications at the same time. To provide user-based scheduling and performance isolation among the users in such systems, we propose a new resource scheduling scheme for multi-user surface computing environments. The proposed scheme creates an individual resource group (user group) for each user, and inserts all processes of the user into the user group at the time the processes are created. Since the user group can be isolated from other user groups and the system can allocate resources based on users, not processes, the proposed scheme provides user-based scheduling and performance isolation among the users. In our experiments, the proposed scheme shows 1.56 times and 1.66 times better performance for CPU and I/O benchmarks, respectively, compared to the conventional scheme.