Design and implementation of a Parallel Pthread Library (PPL) with parallelism and portability

Although multi thread libraries have been implemented to provide threads - a unit of concurrent/parallel execution - at user level, there is no thread library that provides both parallelism and portability. We designed and implemented the PPL (Parallel Pthread Library) with the following two requirements in mind: (1) It should permit parallel execution according to the system, and (2) it should provide a common thread environment for many operating systems and be highly portable. We employed a multi-routine approach to realize parallelism, separating the internal structure of PPL into two parts to expedite portability: namely, a virtual processor dependent module and a virtual processor-independent module. We implemented PPL in several systems and compared its performance with other user-level threads. Furthermore, we evaluated parallelism in multi-processor systems. The results show that PPL has sufficient portability and parallelism.