Multicore Scheduling for Lightweight Communicating Processes

Process-oriented programming is a design methodology in which software applications are constructed from communicating concurrent processes. A process-oriented design is typically composed of a large number of small isolated concurrent components. These components allow for the scalable parallel execution of the resulting application on both shared-memory and distributed-memory architectures. In this paper we present a runtime designed to support process-oriented programming by providing lightweight processes and communication primitives. Our runtime scheduler, implemented using lock-free algorithms, automatically executes concurrent components in parallel on multicore systems. Runtime heuristics dynamically group processes into cache-affine work units based on communication patterns. Work units are then distributed via wait-free work-stealing. Initial performance analysis shows that, using the algorithms presented in this paper, process-oriented software can execute with an efficiency...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: COORDINATION
• Authors: Carl G. Ritson, Adam T. Sampson, Fred R. M. Barnes
• Keywords: COORDINATION 2009, Parallel Computing, Process-oriented Design, Process-oriented Programming, Process-oriented Software