Chapter 4: Threads &

Concurrency

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Chapter 4: Threads
 Overview
 Multicore Programming
 Multithreading Models
 Thread Libraries
 Implicit Threading
 Threading Issues
 Operating System Examples

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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 – 10th Edition 4.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Motivation

 Most modern applications are multithreaded

 Threads run within application
 Multiple tasks with the application can be
implemented by separate threads
 Update display
 Fetch data
 Spell checking
 Answer a network request
 Process creation is heavy-weight while thread
creation is light-weight
 Can simplify code, increase efficiency
 Kernels are generally multithreaded

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Multithreaded Server Architecture

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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 – 10th Edition 4.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Multicore Programming

 Multicore or multiprocessor systems putting pressure on

programmers, challenges include:
 Dividing activities
 Balance
 Data splitting
 Data dependency
 Testing and debugging
 Parallelism implies a system can perform more than one
task simultaneously
 Concurrency supports more than one task making
progress
 Single processor / core, scheduler providing
concurrency

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Multicore Programming (Cont.)

 Types of parallelism
 Data parallelism – distributes subsets of the
same data across multiple cores, same operation
on each
 Task parallelism – distributing threads across
cores, each thread performing unique operation
 As # of threads grows, so does architectural support
for threading
 CPUs have cores as well as hardware threads
 Consider Oracle SPARC T4 with 8 cores, and 8
hardware threads per core

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Concurrency vs. Parallelism
 Concurrent execution on single-core system:

 Parallelism on a multi-core system:

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Single and Multithreaded Processes

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Amdahl’s Law
 Identifies performance gains from adding additional cores
to an application that has both serial and parallel
components
 S is serial portion
 N processing cores

 That is, if application is 75% parallel / 25% serial, moving

from 1 to 2 cores results in speedup of 1.6 times
 As N approaches infinity, speedup approaches 1 / S

Serial portion of an application has disproportionate

effect on performance gained by adding additional cores

 But does the law take into account contemporary

multicore systems?
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 User Threads and Kernel Threads

 User threads - management done by user-level threads library

 Three primary thread libraries:
 POSIX Pthreads
 Windows threads
 Java threads
 Kernel threads - Supported by the Kernel
 Examples – virtually all general purpose operating systems, including:
 Windows
 Solaris
 Linux
 Tru64 UNIX
 Mac OS X

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 Multithreading Models

 Many-to-One

 One-to-One

 Many-to-Many

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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 – 10th Edition 4.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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
 Windows
 Linux
 Solaris 9 and later

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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
 Windows with the ThreadFiber
package

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Two-level Model
 Similar to M:M, except that it allows a user
thread to be bound to kernel thread
 Examples
 IRIX
 HP-UX
 Tru64 UNIX
 Solaris 8 and earlier

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Pthreads

 May be provided either as user-level or kernel-level

 A POSIX standard (IEEE 1003.1c) API for thread
creation and synchronization
 Specification, not implementation
 API specifies behavior of the thread library,
implementation is up to development of the library
 Common in UNIX operating systems (Solaris, Linux,
Mac OS X)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Pthreads Example

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Pthreads
Pthreads Example
Example (Cont.)(Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Pthreads Code for Joining 10 Threads

Operating System Concepts – 9 th Edition 4. 21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

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 Windows Multithreaded C Program

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Windows Multithreaded C Program (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Java Threads

 Java threads are managed by the JVM

 Typically implemented using the threads model
provided by underlying OS
 Java threads may be created by:

 Extending Thread class

 Implementing the Runnable interface

class Task implements Runnable

{
public void run() {
System.out.println("I am a thread.");
}
}
Thread worker = new Thread(new Task());
worker.start();
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Java Threads
 Lambda Expressions in Java
 Similar to functional programming languages
 Java versions 1.8 onwards
 Cleaner syntax without defining a separate class that
implements runnable

Runnable task = () -> {

System.out.println("I am a thread.");
};

Thread worker = new Thread(task);

worker.start();
 Invoking the start() method for the new Thread object
does two things:
 1. It allocates memory and initializes a new thread in
the JVM.
 2. It calls the run() method, making the thread eligible
to be run by the JVM.
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Java Multithreaded Program

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Java Multithreaded Program (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Implicit Threading

 Growing in popularity as numbers of threads increase, program

correctness more difficult with explicit threads
 Creation and management of threads done by compilers and
run-time libraries rather than programmers
 Application developers identify tasks—not threads—that can run
in parallel
 A task is written as a function, the run-time library maps to a
separate thread, typically using the many-to-many model
 Developers only need to identify parallel tasks, and the libraries
determine the specific details of thread creation and
management.
 Four methods explored
 Thread Pools
 Fork join
 OpenMP
 Grand Central Dispatch
 Other methods include Microsoft Threading Building Blocks
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Thread Pools
 Create a number of threads at start-up and place in a pool
where they await work
 Advantages:
 Usually slightly faster to service a request with an existing
thread than create a new thread
 Allows the number of threads in the application(s) to be
bound to the size of the pool
 Separating task to be performed from mechanics of creating
task allows different strategies for running task
 i.e. Tasks could be scheduled to execute after a time
delay or to run periodically
 Windows API supports thread pools, a function that is to run as
a separate thread is defined

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Fork Join
 The main parent thread creates (forks) one or more child threads
and then waits for the children to terminate and join with it
 This thread creation technique is an excellent candidate for
implicit threading
 A library manages the number of threads that are created and is
also responsible for assigning tasks to threads.
 In some ways, this fork-join model is a synchronous version of
thread pools in which a library determines the actual number of
threads to create

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Fork Join in Java
 Java introduced a fork-join library in Version 1.7 of the API that is
designed to be used with recursive divide-and-conquer
algorithms such as Quicksort and Mergesort.
 Separate tasks are forked during the divide step and assigned
smaller subsets of the original problem
 The general recursive algorithm behind Java's fork-join model:

Task(problem)
if problem is small enough
solve the problem directly
else
subtask1 = fork(new Task(subset of problem)
subtask2 = fork(new Task(subset of problem)

result1 = join(subtask1)
result2 = join(subtask2)

return combined results

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Fork Join in Java
 Example: a divide-and-conquer algorithm that sums all elements
in an array of integers.
 In Version 1.7 of the API Java introduced a new thread pool—the
ForkJoinPool—that can be assigned tasks that inherit the abstract
base class ForkJoinTask (which for now we will assume is the
SumTask class).
 The following creates a ForkJoinPool object and submits the initial
task via its invoke() method:
ForkJoinPool pool = new ForkJoinPool();
// array contains the integers to be summed
int[] array = new int[SIZE];

SumTask task = new SumTask(0, SIZE - 1, array);

int sum = pool.invoke(task);

 Upon completion, the initial call to invoke() returns the

summation of array

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 4.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Fork Join in Java
import java.util.concurrent.*;

public class SumTask extends RecursiveTask<Integer>
{
static final int THRESHOLD = 1000;

private int begin;

private int end;
private int[] array;

public SumTask(int begin, int end, int[] array) {

this.begin = begin;
this.end = end;
this.array = array;
}
protected Integer compute() {
if (end - begin < THRESHOLD) {
int sum = 0;
for (int i = begin; i <= end; i++)
sum += array[i];

return sum;
}
else {
int mid = (begin + end) / 2;

SumTask leftTask = new SumTask(begin, mid, array);

SumTask rightTask = new SumTask(mid + 1, end, array);

leftTask.fork();
rightTask.fork();

return rightTask.join() + leftTask.join();

}
}
Operating System Concepts}– 10th Edition 4.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 OpenMP
 Set of compiler directives and
an API for C, C++, FORTRAN
 Provides support for parallel
programming in shared-memory
environments
 Identifies parallel regions –
blocks of code that can run in
parallel
#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 – 10th Edition 4.35 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018