Speaker: Amy Ousterhout
Location: Soda Hall, 510
Date: Friday, March 20th, 2026
Time: 12-1 pm PT
Title: Software and Hardware Support for Fine-Grained Preemptive Scheduling
Abstract:
Preemptive scheduling has the potential to mitigate head-of-line blocking and improve performance for datacenter applications. However, server-side software today does not employ fine-grained (microsecond-scale) preemptive scheduling, largely due to the overheads of existing preemption mechanisms. Intel recently introduced support for user interrupts, a new, lighter-weight mechanism for sending interrupts. In this talk, we shed light on how user interrupts impact the landscape of preemption mechanisms. We analyze the raw performance of user interrupts compared to existing mechanisms and describe the software support that is necessary in order to fully benefit from this new mechanism. In addition, we propose processor extensions that can further lower the overhead of sending and receiving interrupts and enable new interrupt-related functionality.
Speaker Bio: Amy Ousterhout is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. Her research focuses on making datacenter systems more resource efficient while still maintaining high throughput and microsecond-scale latencies. She is the recipient of a Google Research Scholar Award and a Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award. Prior to UCSD, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the NetSys Lab at UC Berkeley, and she earned her Ph.D. from MIT.