Publication Details
Title: Thread Migration with Active Threads
Author: M. Holtkamp
Group: ICSI Technical Reports
Date: September 1997
PDF: ftp://ftp.icsi.berkeley.edu/pub/techreports/1997/tr-97-038.pdf
Overview:
This thesis introduced thread migration as a tool to ease parallel programming with multiple SMPs connected by fast networks. Simple dynamic load balancing strategies have been implemented that automatically migrate threads between cluster. It has been shown that applications could improve their performance using a very simple load balancing strategy. Even for the worst initial distribution) of the application, applications gained speedup up to the number of overall processors used. The improvements could be achieved for different problems and different numbers of processors. These performance measurements show that load balancing eases the placement problem of parallel applications on multiple SMPs. If the initial distribution of the application is unfavorable, the unbalanced load can be balanced effectively. Even further, applications do not have to care for the placement. Speedups are achieved if all threads of the application are started on one cluster. Active Threads offer a flexible event handler mechanism that makes it possible to implement even more flexible load balancing policies with thread migration than the one used in this work. This might gain in further improvements. One can think of migrating bundles of semantically related threads. One can also implement mechanisms to migrate data to improve the locality of the execution.
Bibliographic Information:
ICSI Technical Report TR-97-038
Bibliographic Reference:
M. Holtkamp. Thread Migration with Active Threads. ICSI Technical Report TR-97-038, September 1997
Author: M. Holtkamp
Group: ICSI Technical Reports
Date: September 1997
PDF: ftp://ftp.icsi.berkeley.edu/pub/techreports/1997/tr-97-038.pdf
Overview:
This thesis introduced thread migration as a tool to ease parallel programming with multiple SMPs connected by fast networks. Simple dynamic load balancing strategies have been implemented that automatically migrate threads between cluster. It has been shown that applications could improve their performance using a very simple load balancing strategy. Even for the worst initial distribution) of the application, applications gained speedup up to the number of overall processors used. The improvements could be achieved for different problems and different numbers of processors. These performance measurements show that load balancing eases the placement problem of parallel applications on multiple SMPs. If the initial distribution of the application is unfavorable, the unbalanced load can be balanced effectively. Even further, applications do not have to care for the placement. Speedups are achieved if all threads of the application are started on one cluster. Active Threads offer a flexible event handler mechanism that makes it possible to implement even more flexible load balancing policies with thread migration than the one used in this work. This might gain in further improvements. One can think of migrating bundles of semantically related threads. One can also implement mechanisms to migrate data to improve the locality of the execution.
Bibliographic Information:
ICSI Technical Report TR-97-038
Bibliographic Reference:
M. Holtkamp. Thread Migration with Active Threads. ICSI Technical Report TR-97-038, September 1997