Parallel pthread library (PPL): user-level thread library with parallelism and portability

Light-weight processes, threads, are fast vehicles for concurrent/parallel execution in a single program. There are two thread models; 1) kernel-level thread model and 2) user-level one. Although the kernel-level threads are more light-weight than UNIX processes, it have observed that they are less light-weight than we expected. Therefore, the user-level thread model has attracted attention of researchers. There have been many user-level thread libraries. However, theses do not seem to support both of portability and parallelism, which are important aspects of software engineering and parallel processing. Parallel Pthread Library (PPL), we are developing, aims at supporting the both. In this paper, we describe PPL. Furthermore, through implementing the first version of PPL on two operating systems and hardware architectures, we compare the basic performance of it with that of other existing user-level thread libraries.