A library implementation of the nano-threads programming model

Abstract

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a user-level thread package based on the nano-threads programming model, whose goal is to efficiently manage the application parallelism at user-level. Nano-thread applications work close to the operating system to quickly adapt to resource availability.

The goal is to obtain an efficient parallel execution of the nano-threads by appropriately balancing the work assigned to each thread and the thread management overhead. Early experiments let us determine that the appropriate number of operations spread out among the threads to ensure less than 10% of overhead is around 800. Recent experiments show that this nano-thread granularity is fine enough to adapt easily to the system conditions, granting a reduced response time.