Many-to-many mapping models for user- to kernel-level threads (or "M:N threads") have been extensively studied for decades as a lightweight substitute for current Pthreads implementations that provide a simple one-to-one mapping ("1:1 threads"). M:N threads derive performance from their ability to allow users to context switch between threads and control their scheduling entirely in user space with no kernel involvement. This same ability, however, causes M:N threads to lose the kernel-provided ability of implicit OS preemption---threads have to explicitly yield control for other threads to be scheduled. Hence, programs over nonpreemptive M:N threads can cause core starvation, loss of prioritization, and, sometimes, deadlock unless programs are written to explicitly yield in proper places. This paper explores two techniques for M:N threads to efficiently achieve implicit preemption similar to 1:1 threads: signal-yield and KLT-switching. Overheads of these techniques, with our optimizations, can be less than 1% compared with nonpreemptive M:N threads. Our evaluation with three applications demonstrates that our preemption techniques for M:N threads improve core utilization and enhance the performance by utilizing lightweight context switching and flexible scheduling of M:N threads.

User-level threads have been widely adopted as a means of achieving lightweight concurrent execution without the costs of OS-level threads. Nevertheless, the costs of managing user-level threads represent a performance barrier that dictates how fine grained the concurrency exposed by an application can be without incurring significant overheads; this in turn may translate into insufficient parallelism to exploit highly parallel systems. This article is a deep dive into the fundamental costs in implementing user-level threads. We first identify that one of the highest sources of fork-join overheads stems from deviations, events that incur context switching during the execution of a thread and disrupt a run-to-completion execution. We then conduct an in-depth investigation of a wide spectrum of methods with respect to how they handle deviations while covering both parent- and child-first scheduling policies. Our methodology involves a comprehensive instruction- and cache-level analysis of all methods on several modern CPU architectures. The primary finding of our evaluation is that dynamic promotion methods that assume the absence of deviation and dynamically provide context-switching support offer the best trade-off between performance and capability when the likelihood of deviation is low.

OpenMP is widely used by a number of applications, computational libraries, and runtime systems. As a result, multiple levels of the software stack use OpenMP independently of one another, often leading to nested parallel regions. Although exploiting such nested parallelism is a potential opportunity for performance improvement, it often causes destructive performance with leading OpenMP runtimes because of their reliance on heavyweight OS-level threads. User-level threads (ULTs) are more lightweight alternatives but existing ULT-based runtimes suffer from several shortcomings: 1) thread management costs remain significant and outweigh the benefits from additional parallelism; 2) the shift to ULTs often hurts the more common flat parallelism case; and 3) absence of user control over thread-to-CPU binding, a critical feature on modern systems. This paper presents BOLT, a practical ULT-based OpenMP runtime system that efficiently supports both flat and nested parallelism. This is accomplished on three fronts: 1) advanced data reuse and thread synchronization strategies; 2) thread coordination that adapts to the level of oversubscription; and 3) an implementation of the modern OpenMP thread-to-CPU binding interface tailored to ULT-based runtimes. The result is a highly optimized runtime that transparently achieves similar performance compared with leading state-of-the-art widely used OpenMP runtimes under flat parallelism, while outperforming all existing runtimes under nested parallelism.

Efforts to mitigate lock contention from concurrent threaded accesses to MPI have reduced contention through fine-grained locking, avoided locking altogether by offloading communication to dedicated threads, or alleviated negative side effects from contention by using better lock management protocols. The blocking nature of lock-based methods, however, wastes the asynchrony benefits of nonblocking MPI operations, and the offloading model sacrifices CPU resources and incurs unnecessary software offloading overheads under low contention.

In the past few decades, a number of user-level threading and tasking models have been proposed in the literature to address the shortcomings of OS-level threads, primarily with respect to cost and flexibility. Current state-of-the-art user-level threading and tasking models, however, either are too specific to applications or architectures or are not as powerful or flexible. In this paper, we present Argobots, a lightweight, low-level threading and tasking framework that is designed as a portable and performant substrate for high-level programming models or runtime systems. Argobots offers a carefully designed execution model that balances generality of functionality with providing a rich set of controls to allow specialization by end users or high-level programming models. We describe the design, implementation, and performance characterization of Argobots and present integrations with three high-level models: OpenMP, MPI, and colocated I/O services. Evaluations show that (1) Argobots, while providing richer capabilities, is competitive with existing simpler generic threading runtimes; (2) our OpenMP runtime offers more efficient interoperability capabilities than production OpenMP runtimes do; (3) when MPI interoperates with Argobots instead of Pthreads, it enjoys reduced synchronization costs and better latency-hiding capabilities; and (4) I/O services with Argobots reduce interference with colocated applications while achieving performance competitive with that of a Pthreads approach.

Task parallel models supporting dynamic and hierarchical parallelism are believed to offer a promising direction to achieving higher performance and programmability. Divide-and-conquer is the most frequently used idiom in task parallel models, which decomposes the problem instance into smaller ones until they become "trivial" to solve. However, it incurs a high tasking overhead if a task is created for each subproblem. In order to reduce this overhead, a "cut-off" is commonly used, which eliminates task creations where they are unlikely to be beneficial. The manual cut-off typically enlarges leaf tasks by stopping task creations when a subproblem becomes smaller than a threshold, and possibly transforms the enlarged leaf tasks into specialized versions for solving small instances (e.g., use loops instead of recursive calls); it duplicates the coding work and hinders productivity.