A comparative analysis of fine-grain threads packages
نویسندگان
چکیده
The rising availability of multiprocessing platforms has increased the importance of providing programming models that allow users to express parallelism simply, portably, and efficiently. One popular way to write parallel programs is to use threads for concurrent sections of code. User-level threads packages allow programmers to implement multithreaded programs in which thread creation, thread management, and thread synchronization are relatively inexpensive. Fine-grain programs are multithreaded programs in which the work is divided into a large number of threads, where each thread contains a relatively small amount of work. The potential benefit of large numbers of threads include easier load balancing, better scalability, greater potential for overlapping communication and computation, and improved platform-independence. However, fine-grain programs are largely considered inefficient due to the overheads involved in managing numerous threads. In this paper, we survey several thread packages that take different approaches to the problem of efficiently supporting the creation and management of large numbers of fine-grain threads. Each package is compared based on its level of support of the general thread model as well as its performance on a set of finegrain parallel programs. We find that while the thread packages we tested may support medium-grain parallelism efficiently, they do not always support fine-grain parallelism. Although no package supports fine-grain parallelism and a general thread model, we believe that it can potentially be done with help from the compiler.
منابع مشابه
Performance Analysis of Enhanced Fine–grain Multithreaded Distributed–memory Systems
In fine–grain multithreading, the thread changes in each processor cycle, consecutive instructions are thus issued from different threads, and no data dependencies stall the pipeline. Enhanced fine–grain multithreading maintains a number of additional threads which are used to replace an active thread when it initiates a long–latency operation. Performance improvements due to enhanced multithre...
متن کاملFilaments: Efficient Support for Fine-Grain Parallelism
It has long been thought that coarse-grain parallelism is much more efficient than fine-grain parallelism due to the overhead of process (thread) creation, context switching, and synchronization. On the other hand, there are several advantages to fine-grain parallelism: architecture independence, ease of programming, ease of use as a target for code generation, and load-balancing potential. Thi...
متن کاملDEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE Filaments: Efficient Support for Fine-Grain Parallelism
It has long been thought that coarse-grain parallelism is much more efficient than fine-grain parallelism due to the overhead of process (thread) creation, context switching, and synchronization. On the other hand, there are several advantages to fine-grain parallelism: architecture independence, ease of programming, ease of use as a target for code generation, and load-balancing potential. Thi...
متن کاملA Performance Evaluation of Fine- Grain Thread Migration with Active Threads
Thread migration is established as a mechanism for achieving dynamic load sharing and data locality. However, migration has not been used with fine-grained parallelism due to the relatively high overheads associated with thread and messaging packages. This paper describes a high performance thread migration system for fine-grained parallelism, implemented with user level threads and user level ...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید
ثبت ناماگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید
ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- J. Parallel Distrib. Comput.
دوره 63 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2003