Distributed Filaments: Efficient Fine-Grain Parallelism on a Cluster of Workstations

A fine-grain parallel program is one in which processes are typically small, ranging from a few to a few hundred instructions. Fine-grain parallelism arises naturally in many situations, such as iterative grid computations, recursive fork/join programs, the bodies of parallel FOR loops, and the implicit parallelism in functional or dataflow languages. It is useful both to describe massively parallel computations and as a target for code generation by compilers. However, fine-grain parallelism has long been thought to be inefficient due to the overheads of process creation, context switching, and synchronization. This paper describes a software kernel, Distributed Filaments (DF), that implements fine-grain parallelism both portably and efficiently on a workstation cluster. DF runs on existing, off-theshelf hardware and software. It has a simple interface, so it is easy to use. DF achieves efficiency by using stateless threads on each node, overlapping communication and computation, emp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: OSDI
• Authors: Vincent W. Freeh, David K. Lowenthal, Gregory R. Andrews
• Keywords: Fine-grain Parallelism, Iterative Grid Computations, Operating System, OSDI 1994, Parallel For Loops