Chapter 4: Threads

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Chapter 4: Threads
 Overview
 Multicore Programming
 Multithreading Models
 Thread Libraries
 Implicit Threading
 Threading Issues
 Operating System Examples

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Objectives
 To introduce the notion of a thread—a fundamental unit of CPU utilization that forms the basis of
multithreaded computer systems

 To discuss the APIs for the Pthreads, Windows, and Java thread libraries

 To explore several strategies that provide implicit threading

 To examine issues related to multithreaded programming

 To cover operating system support for threads in Windows and Linux

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Single and Multithreaded Processes
 A thread is a basic unit of CPU utilization

 It comprises a thread ID, a program counter, a register set, and a stack.

 It shares with other threads belonging to the same process its code
section, data section, and other operating-system resources, such as
open files and signals.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Single and Multithreaded Processes

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Motivation
 A web server accepts client requests for web pages, images, sound, and
so forth. A busy web server may have several (perhaps thousands of)
clients concurrently accessing it.

 If the web server ran as a traditional single-threaded process, it would be

able to service only one client at a time, and a client might have to wait a
very long time for its request to be serviced.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Multithreaded Server Architecture

When a server receives a message, it services the message using a

separate thread. This allows the server to service.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Benefits
 Responsiveness – may allow continued execution if part of process is
blocked, especially important for user interfaces

 Resource Sharing – threads share resources of process, easier than

shared memory or message passing

 Economy – cheaper than process creation, thread switching lower

overhead than context switching

 Scalability – process can take advantage of multiprocessor architectures

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Multicore Programming
 A system is parallel if it can perform more than one task
simultaneously.

 In contrast, a concurrent system supports more than one task by

allowing all the tasks to make progress.

 Thus, it is possible to have concurrency without parallelism

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Concurrency vs. Parallelism
 Concurrent execution on single-core system:

 Parallelism on a multi-core system:

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Multicore Programming Challenges
 For designers of operating systems must write scheduling algorithms
that use multiple processing cores to allow the parallel execution.

 For application programmers, the challenge is to modify existing

programs as well as design new programs that are multithreaded

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Multicore Programming Challenges
 In general, five areas present challenges

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Types of Parallelism

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Types of Parallelism: Data parallelism
 Data parallelism focuses on distributing subsets of the same data
across multiple computing cores and performing the same operation on
each core. For example, summing the contents of an array of size N.

 On a single-core system, one thread would simply sum the elements

[0] . . . [N − 1].

 On a dual-core system, however,

 The thread A, running on Core-0, could sum the elements [0] . . . [N/2 − 1]
 The thread B, running on Core-1, could sum the elements [N/2] . . . [N − 1].

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Types of Parallelism: Task parallelism
 Task parallelism involves distributing not data but tasks (threads)
across multiple computing cores.

 Each thread is performing a unique operation. Different threads may be

operating on the same data, or they may be operating on different data.

 An example of task parallelism might involve two threads, each

performing a unique statistical operation on the array of elements.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 User Threads and Kernel Threads
 User threads - management done by user-level threads library

 Three primary thread libraries:

 POSIX Pthreads
 Windows threads
 Java threads

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 User Threads and Kernel Threads
 Kernel threads - Supported by the Kernel

 Examples – virtually all general purpose operating systems, including:

 Windows
 Solaris
 Linux
 Tru64 UNIX
 Mac OS X

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Multithreading Models
1. Many-to-One

2. One-to-One

3. Many-to-Many

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Many-to-One
 Many user-level threads mapped to single
kernel thread.
 One thread blocking causes all to block
 Multiple threads may not run in parallel on
muticore system because only one may be in
kernel at a time

 Few systems currently use this model

 Examples:
 Solaris Green Threads
 GNU Portable Threads

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 One-to-One
 Each user-level thread maps to kernel thread
 Creating a user-level thread creates a kernel thread
 More concurrency than many-to-one
 Number of threads per process sometimes restricted due to overhead
 Examples are Windows, Linux, Solaris 9 and later

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Many-to-Many Model
 Allows many user level threads to be mapped to many kernel threads
 Allows the operating system to create a sufficient number of kernel
threads
 Solaris prior to version 9 and Windows with the ThreadFiber package

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Two-level Model

 Similar to M:M, except that it allows a user thread to be bound to

kernel thread
 Example is Solaris 8 and earlier

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Thread Libraries
 Thread library provides programmer with API for creating and managing
threads

 Two primary ways of implementing

 Library entirely in user space
 Kernel-level library supported by the OS

 Three main thread libraries are in use today

1. POSIX Pthreads
2. Windows
3. Java (we will focus on java threads in rest of the slides)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Java Threads
 All Java programs comprise at least a single thread of control—even a
simple Java program consisting of only a main() method runs as a
single thread

 Java threads are managed by the JVM

 Java threads are available on any system that provides a JVM

including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

 The Java thread API is available for Android applications as well.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Java Threads
 Java threads may be created by:

a) Extending/derived Thread class

b) Implementing the Runnable interface

 More commonly used— technique is to define a class that implements

the Runnable interface

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Java Threads
 When a class implements Runnable, it must define a run() method.

 The code implementing the run() method is what runs as a separate

thread.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Java Multithreaded Program

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Java Multithreaded Program

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Implicit Threading
 With the continued growth of multicore processing, applications
containing hundreds—or even thousands—of threads are looming on
the horizon.

 Designing such applications is not a trivial undertaking. As numbers of

threads increase, program correctness more difficult with explicit
threads.

 A better solution the design of multithreaded applications is to transfer

the creation and management of threading from application developers
to compilers and run-time libraries

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Implicit Threading
 By Implicit Threading we means creation and management of threads
done by compilers and run-time libraries rather than programmers.

 Implicit Threading EXAMPLES

 Thread Pools
 OpenMP
 Grand Central Dispatch
 Microsoft Threading Building Blocks (TBB)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Thread Pools
 Thread pool is to create a number of threads at process startup and
place them into a pool, where they sit and wait for work.

 When a server receives a request, it awakens a thread from this pool—if

one is available—and passes it the request for service.

 Once the thread completes its service, it returns to the pool and awaits
more work

 If the pool contains no available thread, the server waits until one
becomes free.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Thread Pools
 Advantages:

1. Slightly faster to service a request with an existing thread than create a

new thread

2. Allows the number of threads in the application(s) to be bound to the size

of the pool. Important on systems that cannot support a large number of
concurrent threads.

3. Separating task to be performed from mechanics of creating task allows

different strategies for running task

 Windows API supports thread pools

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 OpenMP
 OpenMP is a set of compiler directives as well as an API for programs
written in C, C++, or FORTRAN that provides support for parallel
programming in shared-memory environments.

 OpenMP identifies parallel regions as blocks of code that may run in

parallel

 Application developers insert compiler directives into their code at

parallel regions, and these directives instruct the OpenMP run-time
library to execute the region in parallel

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 OpenMP
#pragma omp parallel
Create as many threads as there are
cores

#pragma omp parallel for

for(i=0;i<N;i++
c[i] = a[i] + b[i];
Run for loop in parallel

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Other Approaches
Other commercial approaches include

nA notable example is the java.util.concurrent package, which supports

implicit thread creation and management.

nIntel’s Threading Building Blocks (TBB) and several products from

Microsoft

nGrand Central Dispatch (GCD)—a technology for Apple’s Mac OS X and

iOS operating systems allows application developers to identify sections of
code to run in parallel.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.35 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Homework
 Write answers to the (Only) even numbered exercise
question from 4.1 to 4.16

 Only handwritten neat and clean homework will be

accepted.

 Page size and page quality through out the course

should remain the same.

 Throughout this course, homework should be

submitted to CR in next class after the class
attendance.

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 4.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 End of Chapter 4

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013