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Home ยป Distributed Filaments: Efficient Fine-Grain Parallelism on a Cluster of Workstations
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Distributed Filaments: Efficient Fine-Grain Parallelism on a Cluster of Workstations

Authors: 

Vincent W. Freeh, David K. Lowenthal, Gregory R. Andrews, University of Arizona

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 it 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/joing computations.

Vincent W. Freeh, University of Arizona

David K. Lowenthal, University of Arizona

Gregory R. Andrews, University of Arizona

BibTeX
@inproceedings {260144,
author = {Vincent W. Freeh and David K. Lowenthal and Gregory R. Andrews},
title = {Distributed Filaments: Efficient Fine-Grain Parallelism on a Cluster of Workstations},
booktitle = {First Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation ({OSDI} 94)},
year = {1994},
address = {Monterey, CA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi-94/distributed-filaments-efficient-fine-grain-parallelism-cluster-workstations},
publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
month = nov,
}
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Links

Paper: 
http://usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/osdi/full_papers/freeh.ps
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