NDLI: Pthreads for Dynamic and Irregular Parallelism

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Narlikar, G.J. Blelloch, G.E.
Copyright Year	1998
Description	Author affiliation: CMU School of Computer Science (Narlikar, G.J.)
Abstract	High performance applications on shared memory machines have typically been written in a coarse grained style, with one heavyweight thread per processor. In comparison, programming with a large number of lightweight, parallel threads has several advantages, including simpler coding for programs with irregular and dynamic parallelism, and better adaptability to a changing number of processors. The programmer can express a new thread to execute each individual parallel task; the implementation dynamically creates and schedules these threads onto the processors, and effectively balances the load. However, unless the threads scheduler is designed carefully, the parallel program may suffer poor space and time performance. In this paper, we study the performance of a native, lightweight POSIX threads (Pthreads) library on a shared memory machine running Solaris; to our knowledge, the Solaris library is one of the most efficient user-level implementations of the Pthreads standard available today. To evaluate this Pthreads implementation, we use a set of parallel programs that dynamically create a large number of threads. The programs include dense and sparse matrix multiplies, two N-body codes, a data classifier, a volume rendering benchmark, and a high performance FFT package. We find the existing threads scheduler to be unsuitable for executing such programs. We show how simple modifications to the Pthreads scheduler can result in significantly improved space and time performance for the programs; the modified scheduler results in as much as 44% less running time and 63% less memory requirement compared to the original Pthreads implementation. Our results indicate that, provided we use a good scheduler, the rich functionality and standard API of Pthreads can be combined with the advantages of dynamic, lightweight threads to result in high performance.
Starting Page	31
Ending Page	31
File Size	468491
Page Count	1
File Format	PDF
ISBN	081868707X
DOI	10.1109/SC.1998.10005
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	1998-11-07
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM)
Subject Keyword	Yarn Processor scheduling Kernel Libraries Dynamic scheduling Parallel processing Computer science Dynamic programming Programming profession Packaging lightweight threads Multithreading Pthreads space efficiency dynamic scheduling irregular parallelism
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
6	Contents and Copyright Issues	Queries related to content curation and copyright issues	content@ndl.gov.in
7	National Digital Library of India Club (NDLI Club)	Queries related to NDLI Club formation, support, user awareness program, seminar/symposium, collaboration, social media, promotion, and outreach	clubsupport@ndl.gov.in
8	Digital Preservation Centre (DPC)	Assistance with digitizing and archiving copyright-free printed books	dpc@ndl.gov.in
9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in

Pthreads for dynamic and irregular parallelism

Qthreads: An API for programming with millions of lightweight threads

Work-first and help-first scheduling policies for async-finish task parallelism

Programming irregular scientific algorithms with static properties on clusters of SMP nodes

Dynamic Task Scheduling and Load Balancing on Cell Processors

Minimizing startup costs for performance-critical threading

The PANDA system architecture-a pico-kernel approach

ThreadMon: a tool for monitoring multithreaded program performance

Exploiting Java instruction/thread level parallelism with horizontal multithreading

Pthreads for Dynamic and Irregular Parallelism

Similar Documents

Pthreads for dynamic and irregular parallelism

Qthreads: An API for programming with millions of lightweight threads

Work-first and help-first scheduling policies for async-finish task parallelism

Programming irregular scientific algorithms with static properties on clusters of SMP nodes

Dynamic Task Scheduling and Load Balancing on Cell Processors

Minimizing startup costs for performance-critical threading

The PANDA system architecture-a pico-kernel approach

ThreadMon: a tool for monitoring multithreaded program performance

Exploiting Java instruction/thread level parallelism with horizontal multithreading

Pthreads for Dynamic and Irregular Parallelism