Managing the Overall Balance of Operating System Threads on a Multiprocessor Using Automatic Self-Allocating Threads (ASAT)
✍ Scribed by Charles Severance; Richard Enbody; Paul Petersen
- Book ID
- 102603581
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 211 KB
- Volume
- 37
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0743-7315
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Threads working on compute intensive tasks work best when there is one thread performing real work on each processor. The challenge is to schedule threads to maintain one running thread per processor by dynamically adjusting the number of threads as the overall load on the machine changes. This work identifies the situations on a multiprocessing system when the operation of a lightweight thread compiler run-time environment might be negatively impacted by other threads running on the system. A solution called Automatic Self-Allocating Threads (ASAT) is proposed as a way to balance the number of active threads across a multiprocessing system. Our approach is significant in that it is designed for a system running multiple jobs, and it considers the load of all running jobs in its thread allocation. Our approach uses self-scheduling, so it is implemented in a run-time environment rather than in an operating system. Finally, the self-scheduling means that jobs need not all be scheduled by ASAT.