GLTO: On the Adequacy of Lightweight Thread Approaches for OpenMP Implementations

OpenMP is the de facto standard application programming interface (API) for on-node parallelism. The most popular OpenMP runtimes rely on POSIX threads (pthreads) implementations that offer an excellent performance for coarse-grained parallelism and match perfectly with the current hardware. However, a recent trend in runtimes/applications points in the direction of leveraging massive on-node parallelism in conjunction with fine-grained and dynamic scheduling paradigms. It has been demonstrated that lightweight thread (LWT) solutions are more appropriate for these new parallel paradigms. We have developed GLTO, an OpenMP implementation over the recently-emerged Generic Lightweight Threads (GLT) API. GLT exports a common API for LWT libraries that offers the possibility of running the same application over different native LWT solutions. In this paper we use GLTO to analyze different scenarios where OpenMP implementations may benefit from the use of either LWT or pthreads. Our study reveals that none of the threading approaches obtains the best performance in all the scenarios, but that there are important gaps among them.