Message-pool-based parallel operating system for the Kyushu University Reconfigurable Parallel Processor - parallel creation of multiple threads

The Kyushu University Reconfigurable Parallel Processor system under development is a MIMD-type multiprocessor which consists of 128 processing elements, interconnected by a full (128×128) crossbar network. Reconfigurable memory architecture employed by the system allows the system to be configured as either a shared-memory TCMP (tightly coupled multiprocessor), a message-passing LCMP (loosely coupled multiprocessor), or a hybrid of the two. A parallel operating system under development is for the shared-memory TCMP, and aims at extracting various kinds of parallelism of the operating system itself to provide high-performance. To exploit the parallelism, the operating system is constructed by using a message-pool mechanism. A typical example of the parallelism is the parallel creation of multiple threads. In this paper, we propose four schemes for the parallel creation; the simple parallel scheme, the parallel template scheme, the chunk scheme, and the combination scheme. Simulation results show that the chunk scheme is the most desirable among the schemes.