Scheduling threads for low space requirement and good locality

Abstract

A simple, asynchronous, space-efficient scheduling algorithm for shared memory machines was developed. The algorithm combined the low scheduling overheads and good locality of work stealing with the low space requirements of depth-first schedulers. The algorithm was applied in the context of a native, user-level implementation of Posix standard threads or Pthreads. Its performance was evaluated using a set of C-based benchmarks and was compared with two other schedulers. The new algorithm covered a range of scheduling granularities and space requirements, and allowed the user to trade the space requirement of a program with the scheduling granularity.