Experiments with Virtual C Threads

Virtual C Threads is a user-level threads system built transparently on top of C Threads. Its goal is to insulate the application from much of the implementation differences and limitations in C Threads systems and to make multithreading of large codes practical. The number of available threads is virtually unlimited, and at the same time there is a significant reduction in the number of C thread context switches through lazy evaluation of virtual threads. They evaluate Virtual C Threads from an application point of view. They measure its performance on parallel symbolic algebra codes and suggest an application programming style that requires little tuning and thus makes multithreading easy and efficient.<<ETX>>