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Foil 3 General Concepts of Multithreading -- 1: What are threads and their benefits

From Threads with TCE in detail CPS600 Spring Semester95 -- April 1995. by Janusz Niemiec and Geoffrey Fox * See also color IMAGE

Multithreading is defined as having multiple contexts of execution within the same address space.
Benefits of having multiple threads of execution:
  • For a large class of applications it is much easier to express a program control flow by concurrent actions than by the finite automaton model.
  • On multiprocessor systems, multiple threads can run in parallel thus speeding up the application execution.
  • Using multiple threads, an application can take an advantage of overlapping between IO and CPU operations (CPU and IO channels can operate concurrently because of different hardware circuitry).
  • Multithreading can mask a large percentage of latency incurred during memory and IO operations.


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