Efficient Runtime Thread Management for the Nano-Threads Programming Model

Abstract. The nano-threads programming model was proposed to effectively integrate multiprogramming on shared-memory multiprocessors, with the exploitation of fine-grain parallelism from standard applications. A prerequisite for the applicability of the nano-threads programming model is the ability of the runtime environment to manage parallelism at any level of granularity with minimal overheads. In this paper, we introduce runtime techniques for efficient memory management and user-level scheduling in an experimental runtime system designed to support the nano-threads programming model. We evaluate the exploitation of processor affinity for the management of nano-thread contexts, and the use of hierarchical queues to implement user-level scheduling strategies for applications with inherent multilevel parallelism. The proposed mechanisms attempt to obtain maximum benefits from data locality on cache-coherent NUMA multiprocessors. Through the use of synthetic benchmarks, we find that o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos, Eleftherios D. Polychronopoulos, Theodore S. Papatheodorou
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Hierarchical Queues, IPPS 1998, Nano-threads Programming Model, User-level Scheduling