A Scheduling Mechanism for Lock-Free Operation of a Lightweight Process Library for SMP Computers

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  • Affiliations:

  • Venue:
  • ICPADS '01 Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Abstract: We have designed and implemented a lightweight process (thread) library called "Lesser Bear" for SMP computers. Lesser Bear has high portability and thread-level parallelism. Lesser Bear executes threads in parallel by creating UNIX processes as virtual processors and a memory-mapped file as a huge shared-memory space. To schedule thread in parallel, the shared-memory space has been divided into working spaces for each virtual processor, and a ready queue has been distributed. But the previous version of Lesser Bear sometimes requires a lock operation for dequeueing. We therefore proposed a scheduling mechanism that does not require a lock operation. To achieve this, each divided space forms a rotatory topology through the queue, and we use a lock-free algorithm for the queue operation. This mechanism is applied to Lesser Bear and evaluated by experimental results.