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Lesser Bear: A lightweight process library for SMP computers—scheduling mechanism without a lock operation
Author(s) -
Oguma Hisashi,
Nakayama Yasuichi
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.633
Subject(s) - computer science , thread (computing) , operating system , parallel computing , queue , software portability , scheduling (production processes) , lock (firearm) , unix , shared memory , embedded system , software , computer network , engineering , mechanical engineering , operations management
We have designed and implemented a lightweight process (thread) library called ‘Lesser Bear’ for SMP computers. Lesser Bear has thread‐level parallelism and high portability. 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. However 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 link topology through the queues, and we use a lock‐free algorithm for the queue operation. This mechanism is applied to Lesser Bear and evaluated by experimental results. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.