Patent ID: 7565659

Claim:
A method for real-time utilization of a plurality of applications with a plurality of light weight context indicators, comprising: receiving, by an operating system, a request from a main application task that requests usage of synergistic processing unit resources by specifying a plurality of synergistic processing unit tasks that are to be executed on at least one synergistic processing unit; detecting and parsing, by the operating system, a light yield field set for each synergistic processing unit task of the plurality of synergistic processing unit tasks; scheduling, by the operating system, application run times for each synergistic processing unit task of the plurality of synergistic processing unit tasks based on priority, context switching cost information, and whether each synergistic processing unit task has real time guarantees using the light yield field set of each synergistic processing unit task; dispatching, by the operating system, a first synergistic processing unit task of the plurality of synergistic processing unit tasks to a given synergistic processing unit within the at least one synergistic processing unit; determining, by the operating system, whether a scheduled time to preempt the first synergistic processing unit task on the given synergistic processing unit is reached; responsive to a determination that the scheduled time to preempt the first synergistic processing unit task on the given synergistic processing unit is reached, notifying the first synergistic processing unit task to proceed to a light weight context point; responsive to a determination that the first synergistic processing unit task has reached the light weight context point, performing, by the operating system, a light weight context save operation to save a light weight context defined by the light yield field set of the first synergistic processing unit task; and dispatching, by the operating system, a second synergistic processing unit task of the plurality of synergistic processing unit tasks to the given synergistic processing unit.