Efficient support for fine-grain parallelism on shared-memory machines
✍ Scribed by LOWENTHAL, DAVID K.; FREEH, VINCENT W.; ANDREWS, GREGORY R.
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 134 KB
- Volume
- 10
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1040-3108
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✦ Synopsis
A coarse-grain parallel program typically has one thread (task) per processor, whereas a finegrain program has one thread for each independent unit of work. Although there are several advantages to fine-grain parallelism, conventional wisdom is that coarse-grain parallelism is more efficient. This paper illustrates the advantages of fine-grain parallelism and presents an efficient implementation for shared-memory machines. The approach has been implemented in a portable software package called Filaments, which employs a unique combination of techniques to achieve efficiency. The performance of the fine-grain programs discussed in this paper is always within 13% of a hand-coded coarse-grain program and is usually within 5%.