Qthreads: An API for programming with millions of lightweight threads

Large scale hardware-supported multithreading, an attractive means of increasing computational power, benefits significantly from low per-thread costs. Hardware support for lightweight threads is a developing area of research. Each architecture with such support provides a unique interface, hinderin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2008 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors: Wheeler, K.B., Murphy, R.C., Thain, D.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.04.2008
Subjects:
Computer architecture
Costs
Hardware
Laboratories
Large-scale systems
Multithreading
Parallel processing
Programming profession
Resource management
Yarn
ISBN:1424416930, 9781424416936
ISSN:1530-2075
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Large scale hardware-supported multithreading, an attractive means of increasing computational power, benefits significantly from low per-thread costs. Hardware support for lightweight threads is a developing area of research. Each architecture with such support provides a unique interface, hindering development for them and comparisons between them. A portable abstraction that provides basic lightweight thread control and synchronization primitives is needed. Such an abstraction would assist in exploring both the architectural needs of large scale threading and the semantic power of existing languages. Managing thread resources is a problem that must be addressed if massive parallelism is to be popularized. The qthread abstraction enables development of large-scale multithreading applications on commodity architectures. This paper introduces the qthread API and its Unix implementation, discusses resource management, and presents performance results from the HPCCG benchmark.
ISBN:1424416930
9781424416936
ISSN:1530-2075
DOI:10.1109/IPDPS.2008.4536359