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Chapter: An Introduction to Parallel Programming : Shared-Memory Programming with Pthreads

Producer-Consumer Synchronization and Semaphores

Although busy-waiting is generally wasteful of CPU resources, it has the property by which we know, in advance, the order in which the threads will execute the code in the critical section: thread 0 is first, then thread 1, then thread 2, and so on.

PRODUCER-CONSUMER SYNCHRONIZATION AND SEMAPHORES

 

Although busy-waiting is generally wasteful of CPU resources, it has the property by which we know, in advance, the order in which the threads will execute the code in the critical section: thread 0 is first, then thread 1, then thread 2, and so on. With


mutexes, the order in which the threads execute the critical section is left to chance and the system. Since addition is commutative, this doesn’t matter in our program for estimating . However, it’s not difficult to think of situations in which we also want to control the order in which the threads execute the code in the critical section. For example, suppose each thread generates an n n matrix, and we want to multiply the matrices together in thread-rank order. Since matrix multiplication isn’t commutative, our mutex solution would have problems:

 

 

/* n and product matrix are shared and initialized by the main thread */

 

/* product matrix is initialized to be the identity matrix */

void Thread work(void* rank) {

 

long my_rank = (long) rank;

 

matrix_t my_mat = Allocate matrix(n);

Generate_matrix(my_mat);

 

pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex);

 

Multiply_matrix(product_mat, my_mat); pthread_mutex_unlock(&mutex);

 

Free_matrix(&my_mat); return NULL;

 

          /*  Thread work  */

 

A somewhat more complicated example involves having each thread “send a mes-sage” to another thread. For example, suppose we have thread count or t threads and we want thread 0 to send a message to thread 1, thread 1 to send a message to thread 2, . . . , thread t- 2 to send a message to thread t- 1 and thread t -1 to send a message to thread 0. After a thread “receives” a message, it can print the message and terminate. In order to implement the message transfer, we can allocate a shared array of char . Then each thread can allocate storage for the message it’s sending, and, after it has initialized the message, set a pointer in the shared array to refer to it. In order to avoid dereferencing undefined pointers, the main thread can set the individual entries in the shared array to NULL. See Program 4.7. When we run the program with more than a couple of threads on a dual-core system, we see that some of the messages are never received. For example, thread 0, which is started first, will typically finish before thread t-1 has copied the message into the messages array. This isn’t surprising, and we could fix the problem by replacing the if statement in Line 12 with a busy-wait while statement:

Program 4.7: A first attempt at sending messages using Pthreads

          /*  messages has type char  . It’s allocated in main.  */

          /*  Each entry is set to NULL in main.       */

          void  Send_msg(void  rank) {

          long my_rank = (long) rank;

          long dest = (my_rank + 1) % thread_count;

          long source = (my_rank + thread_count - 1) % thread_count;

          char*  my_msg = malloc(MSG_MAX* sizeof(char));

          sprintf(my_msg, "Hello to %ld from %ld", dest, my_rank);

          messages[dest] = my_msg;

          if (messages[my_rank] != NULL)

          printf("Thread %ld > %s\n", my_rank, messages[my_rank]);

          else

          printf("Thread %ld > No message from %ld\n", my_rank, source);

          return NULL;

          }  /*  Send msg  */

 

while (messages[my_rank] == NULL);

 

printf("Thread %ld > %s\n", my_rank, messages[my_rank]);

 

Of course, this solution would have the same problems that any busy-waiting solution has, so we’d prefer a different approach.

 

After executing the assignment in Line 10, we’d like to “notify” the thread with rank dest that it can proceed to print the message. We’d like to do something like this:

 

. . .

 

messages[dest] = my_msg;

 

Notify thread dest that it can proceed;

 

Await notification from thread source

 

printf("Thread %ld > %snn", my_rank, messages[my_rank]);

 

. . .

 

It’s not at all clear how mutexes can be of help here. We might try calling pthread mutex unlock to “notify” the thread with rank dest. However, mutexes are initialized to be unlocked, so we’d need to add a call before initializing messages[dest] to lock the mutex. This will be a problem since we don’t know when the threads will reach the calls to pthread mutex lock.

To make this a little clearer, suppose that the main thread creates and initializes an array of mutexes, one for each thread. Then, we’re trying to do something like this:

 

          . . .

 

          pthread_mutex_lock(mutex[dest]);

 

          . . .

 

          messages[dest] = my msg;

 

          pthread_mutex_unlock(mutex[dest]);

 

          . . .

 

          pthread_mutex_lock(mutex[my_rank]);

 

          printf("Thread %ld > %snn", my_rank, messages[my_rank]);

 

          . . .

 

Now suppose we have two threads, and thread 0 gets so far ahead of thread 1 that it reaches the second call to pthread mutex lock in Line 7 before thread 1 reaches the first in Line 2. Then, of course, it will acquire the lock and continue to the printf statement. This will result in thread 0’s dereferencing a null pointer, and it will crash.

There are other approaches to solving this problem with mutexes. See, for exam-ple, Exercise 4.7. However, POSIX also provides a somewhat different means of controlling access to critical sections: semaphores. Let’s take a look at them.

 

Semaphores can be thought of as a special type of unsigned int, so they can take on the values 0, 1, 2, . . . . In most cases, we’ll only be interested in using them when they take on the values 0 and 1. A semaphore that only takes on these values is called a binary semaphore. Very roughly speaking, 0 corresponds to a locked mutex, and 1 corresponds to an unlocked mutex. To use a binary semaphore as a mutex, you initialize it to 1—that is, it’s “unlocked.” Before the critical section you want to protect, you place a call to the function sem wait. A thread that executes sem wait will block if the semaphore is 0. If the semaphore is nonzero, it will decrement the semaphore and proceed. After executing the code in the critical section, a thread calls sem post, which increments the semaphore, and a thread waiting in sem wait can proceed.

Semaphores were first defined by the computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra in [13]. The name is taken from the mechanical device that railroads use to control which train can use a track. The device consists of an arm attached by a pivot to a post. When the arm points down, approaching trains can proceed, and when the arm is per-pendicular to the post, approaching trains must stop and wait. The track corresponds to the critical section: when the arm is down corresponds to a semaphore of 1, and when the arm is up corresponds to a semaphore of 0. The sem wait and sem post calls correspond to signals sent by the train to the semaphore controller.

For our current purposes, the crucial difference between semaphores and mutexes is that there is no ownership associated with a semaphore. The main thread can ini-tialize all of the semaphores to 0—that is, “locked,” and then any thread can execute a sem post on any of the semaphores, and, similarly, any thread can execute sem wait on any of the semaphores. Thus, if we use semaphores, our Send msg function can be written as shown in Program 4.8.

Program 4.8: Using semaphores so that threads can send messages

          /*       messages is allocated and initialized to NULL in main  */

          /*  semaphores is allocated and initialized to 0 (locked) in

main  */

 

          void* Send_msg(void*   rank) f

          long my_rank = (long) rank;

          long dest = (my_rank + 1) % thread_count;

          char*  my_msg = malloc(MSG_MAX* sizeof(char));

          sprintf(my_msg, "Hello to %ld from %ld", dest, my_rank);

          messages[dest] = my_msg;

          sem_post(&semaphores[dest])

/*       ‘‘Unlock’’ the semaphore of dest     */

          /*  Wait for our semaphore to be unlocked  */

          sem_wait(&semaphores[my_rank]);

          printf("Thread %ld > %s\n", my_rank, messages[my_rank]);

          return NULL;

          }  /*  Send msg  */

The syntax of the various semaphore functions is

 

int sem init(                            

sem_t*        semaphore/,p       /*       out    */,

int     shared         /*       in       */,

unsigned     initial_val   /*       in       */);

 

 

int sem destroy(sem_t semaphore_p / in/out /);

int sem post(sem_t semaphore_p / in/out /);

int sem wait(sem_t semaphore_p / in/out /);

 

We won’t make use of the second argument to sem init: the constant 0 can be passed in. Note that semaphores are not part of Pthreads. Hence, it’s necessary to add the following preprocessor directive to any program that uses them:5

 

#include <semaphore.h>

 

Finally, note that the message-sending problem didn’t involve a critical section. The problem wasn’t that there was a block of code that could only be executed by one thread at a time. Rather, thread my rank couldn’t proceed until thread source had finished creating the message. This type of synchronization, when a thread can’t proceed until another thread has taken some action, is sometimes called producer-consumer synchronization.


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An Introduction to Parallel Programming : Shared-Memory Programming with Pthreads : Producer-Consumer Synchronization and Semaphores |


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