Lithe: enabling efficient composition of parallel libraries

For the software industry to take advantage of multicore processors, we must allow programmers to arbitrarily compose parallel libraries without sacrificing performance. We argue that high-level task or thread abstractions and a common global scheduler cannot provide effective library composition. Instead, the operating system should expose unvirtualized processing resources that can be shared cooperatively between parallel libraries within an application. In this paper, we describe a system that standardizes and facilitates the exchange of these unvirtualized processing resources between libraries.