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Now that we have examined the way shared-memory multiprocessor hardware operates, we need to examine how software operates on these types of computers. We still have to wait until the next chapters to begin making our FORTRAN programs run in parallel. For now, we use C programs to examine the fundamentals of multiprocessing and multithreading. There are several techniques used to implement multithreading, so the topics we will cover include:
The last of these is what we primarily will use to reduce the walltime of our applications.
Most modern general-purpose operating systems support some form of multiprocessing. Multiprocessing doesn’t require more than one physical CPU; it is simply the operating system’s ability to run more than one
process on the system. The operating system context-switches between each process at fixed time intervals, or on interrupts or input-output activity. For example, in UNIX, if you use the
ps command, you can see the processes on the system:
% ps -a
PID TTY TIME CMD28410 pts/34 0:00 tcsh
28213 pts/38 0:00 xterm10488 pts/51 0:01 telnet
28411 pts/34 0:00 xbiff11123 pts/25 0:00 pine
3805 pts/21 0:00 elm6773 pts/44 5:48 ansys
...% ps –a | grep ansys
6773 pts/44 6:00 ansys
For each process we see the process identifier (PID), the terminal that is executing the command, the amount of CPU time the command has used, and the name of the command. The PID is unique across the entire system. Most UNIX commands are executed in a separate process. In the above example, most of the processes are waiting for some type of event, so they are taking very few resources except for memory. Process 6773 ANSYS is a commonly used structural-analysis package. seems to be executing and using resources. Running ps again confirms that the CPU time is increasing for the ansys process:
% vmstat 5
procs memory page disk faults cpur b w swap free re mf pi po fr de sr f0 s0 -- -- in sy cs us sy id
3 0 0 353624 45432 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 461 5626 354 91 9 03 0 0 353248 43960 0 22 0 0 0 0 0 0 14 0 0 518 6227 385 89 11 0
Running the vmstat 5 command tells us many things about the activity on the system. First, there are three runnable processes. If we had one CPU, only one would actually be running at a given instant. To allow all three jobs to progress, the operating system time-shares between the processes. Assuming equal priority, each process executes about 1/3 of the time. However, this system is a two-processor system, so each process executes about 2/3 of the time. Looking across the vmstat output, we can see paging activity ( pi , po ), context switches ( cs ), overall user time ( us ), system time ( sy ), and idle time ( id ).
Each process can execute a completely different program. While most processes are completely independent, they can cooperate and share information using interprocess communication (pipes, sockets) or various operating system-supported shared-memory areas. We generally don’t use multiprocessing on these shared-memory systems as a technique to increase single-application performance.
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