HELP! * GREY=local LOCAL HTML version of Foils prepared July 6,1995

Foil 22 TCE -- Implementation -- 1: What is a thread and how do you make it!

From Master Foils for Threads with TCE in detail CPS600 Spring Semester95 -- April 1995. by Janusz Niemiec and Geoffrey Fox * See also color IMAGE
Notion of a process and a thread
  • A TCE process is a regular Unix, DOS or WindowsNT process. Although it is spawned according to the user request, its creation and scheduling is carried exclusively by the Operating System.
  • A TCE thread is a light-weight thread of execution. Its creation and destruction as well as scheduling is controlled by the TCE layer. The underlying Operating System is neither involved in those actions, nor it is aware that a process is multithreaded.
Thread creation and destruction
  • When a new TCE process is started, it contains only one thread of execution (single-threaded process). For programs written in C or C++ the main function is the body of that thread. To create more threads, the program has to request it by calling tce_thrd_init, giving a function name and addresses of parameters to that function.

Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, npac@npac.syr.edu

If you have any comments about this server, send e-mail to webmaster@npac.syr.edu.

Page produced by wwwfoil on Tue Feb 18 1997