Abstract
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-the-shelf 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, employing a new reliable datagram communication protocol, and automatically balancing the work generated by fork/join computations.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
State | Published - Nov 14 1994 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 1st USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 1994 - Monterey, United States Duration: Nov 14 1994 → Nov 17 1994 |
Other
Other | 1st USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 1994 |
---|---|
Country/Territory | United States |
City | Monterey |
Period | 11/14/94 → 11/17/94 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Information Systems
- Hardware and Architecture
- Computer Networks and Communications