Cilk: an efficient multithreaded runtime system
PPOPP '95 Proceedings of the fifth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
A hybrid execution model for fine-grained languages on distributed memory multicomputers
Supercomputing '95 Proceedings of the 1995 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Lazy threads: implementing a fast parallel call
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing - Special issue on multithreading for multiprocessors
Using fine-grain threads and run-time decision making in parallel computing
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing - Special issue on multithreading for multiprocessors
Multithreaded programming with Pthreads
Multithreaded programming with Pthreads
The implementation of the Cilk-5 multithreaded language
PLDI '98 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1998 conference on Programming language design and implementation
StackThreads/MP: integrating futures into calling standards
Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
A model and stack implementation of multiple environments
Communications of the ACM
Solution of a problem in concurrent programming control
Communications of the ACM
The concert system--compiler and runtime support for efficient, fine-grained concurrent object-oriented programs
Dyn-MPI: Supporting MPI on Non Dedicated Clusters
Proceedings of the 2003 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Dyn-MPI: Supporting MPI on medium-scale, non-dedicated clusters
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Multithreaded tomographic reconstruction
PVM/MPI'07 Proceedings of the 14th European conference on Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface
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The rising availability of multiprocessing platforms has increased the importance of providing programming models that allow users to express parallelism simply, portably, and efficiently. One popular way to write parallel programs is to use threads for concurrent sections of code. User-level threads packages allow programmers to implement multithreaded programs in which thread creation, thread management, and thread synchronization are relatively inexpensive.Fine-grain programs are multithreaded programs in which the work is divided into a large number of threads, where each thread contains a relatively small amount of work. The potential benefit of large numbers of threads include easier load balancing, better scalability, greater potential for overlapping communication and computation, and improved platform-independence. However, fine-grain programs are largely considered inefficient due to the overheads involved in managing numerous threads. In this paper, we survey several thread packages that take different approaches to the problem of efficiently supporting the creation and management of large numbers of fine-grain threads. Each package is compared based on its level of support of the general thread model as well as its performance on a set of fine-grain parallel programs. We find that while the thread packages we tested may support medium-grain parallelism efficiently, they do not always support fine-grain parallelism. Although no package supports fine-grain parallelism and a general thread model, we believe that it can potentially be done with help from the compiler.