Thread level parallelism of desktop applications

Multiprocessing is already prevalent in servers, where multiple clients present an obvious source of thread level parallelism. The case for multiprocessing is less clear for desktop applications, however processor architects are already designing processors that count on the availability of concurrently runnable threads. In this paper we examine a wide variety of existing desktop workloads (over 50) across three different operating systems (Windows NT, BeOS and Linux) and quantify the amount and nature of thread level parallelism (TLP) in the system. Our results show that OS and application structure have a significant effect on TLP. While most of the workloads exhibit only moderate amounts of paral-lelism (under 1.5), there is evidence that show that many of these workloads are not inherently single threaded.