Enhancing OmpSs-2 Suspendable Tasks by Combining Operating System and User-Level Threads with C++ Coroutines
Arnau Cinca, Aleix Roca, Kevin Sala, Raúl Peñacoba, David Álvarez, Vicenç Beltrán · 2025
This paper explores three methods for implementing suspendable tasks within task-based programming models: OS threads (pthreads), User-Level Threads (ULTs), and C++ coroutines. We enhance the OmpSs-2 programming model, originally supporting suspendable tasks via pthreads, to also accommodate ULTs and C++ coroutines. This unified approach facilitates a comprehensive comparative analysis using various benchmarks that includes recursive fork-join and data-flow parallelization strategies. Additionally, we contrast these suspension methods with the Cilk and OpenMP task-based programming models, which, despite their efficiency, lack support for suspendable tasks. Key contributions of this study include the novel integration of C++20 coroutines into the OmpSs-2 programming model, which can be combined with pthreads or ULTs. Furthermore, we introduce a new Linux kernel syscall that accelerates pthread context switches by an order of magnitude, thus narrowing the performance gap between ULTs and pthreads in context-switch times from two to one order of magnitude. C++ Coroutines are the ideal solution for scenarios where many tasks are simultaneously in a suspended state, or the frequency of task suspension and resumption is high because they have the smallest memory footprint and minor contextswitch overhead. However, they are limited to C++ programs, do not support TLS, and only allow task suspension at top-level functions. Still, pthreads and ULTs can bring remarkable benefits where C++ Coroutines cannot. We conclude that combining the strengths of coroutines with pthreads or ULTs brings productivity and performance benefits for programming models.