Nanothreads: Flexible Thread Scheduling

133 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.The impacts of a shared arena architecture for scheduling threads is analyzed with legacy applications such as FORTRAN computational chemical simulations and mathematical solvers that consume significant processing time in large systems and are difficult to redesign. A representative set of applications from the NAS benchmarks had only their runtime replaced with a new runtime that makes use of the shared arena in IRIX 6.5, and were found to improve their execution time over 14 times when there was a single process used in a 16 processor Origin 2000 from Silicon Graphics, Inc. Another implementation in Linux 2.4 was used to test context-switch performance amongst comparable thread models. Though, the nanoThread scheduler interface is more complicated than the comparable threading designs presented, the performance improvements shown in this dissertation prove that this more efficient thread model warrants implementation in commercial operating systems.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD