Dynamic processor allocation with the Solaris operating system

The loop-level process control (LLPC) policy (Yue and Lilja, 1997) dynamically adjusts the number of threads an application is allowed to execute based on the application´s available parallelism and the overall system load. This study demonstrates the feasibility of incorporating the LLPC strategy into an existing commercial operating system and parallelizing compiler and provides further evidence of the performance improvement that is possible using this dynamic allocation strategy. In this implementation, applications are automatically parallelized and enhanced with the appropriate LLPC hooks so that each application interacts with the modified version of the Solaris operating system. The parallelism of the applications is then dynamically adjusted automatically when they are executed in a multiprogrammed environment so that all applications obtain a fair share of the total processing resources