Priority-driven spatial resource sharing scheduling for embedded graphics processing units

Many visual tasks in modern personal devices such smartphones resort heavily to graphics processing units (GPUs) for their fluent user experiences. Because most GPUs for embedded systems are non-preemptive by nature, it is important to schedule GPU resources efficiently across multiple GPU tasks. We present a novel spatial resource sharing (SRS) technique for GPU tasks, called a budget-reservation spatial resource sharing (BR-SRS) scheduling, which limits the number of GPU processing cores for a job based on the priority of the job. Such a priority-driven resource assignment can prevent a high-priority foreground GPU task from being delayed by background GPU tasks. The BR-SRS scheduler is invoked only twice at the arrival and completion of jobs, and thus, the scheduling overhead is minimized as well. We evaluated the performance of our scheduling scheme in an Android-based smartphone, and found that the proposed technique significantly improved the performance of high-priority tasks in comparison to the previous temporal budget-based multi-task scheduling.