Section 5 describes our preliminary investigation into combining MPI and Pthreads. Finally, our conclusions and directions for future research are presented in Section 6. 2. A single process made up of many independent tasks may break up its computation into a set of concurrently executing threads. Each thread is an instruction stream, with its own stack, sharing a global memory space. This is the basis for our use of threads within the particle dynamics code.
All threads executing within a process are peers.
There is no explicit parent-child relationship. A thread may be halted until another thread completes its task, but ultimately, all threaded tasks are concurrent. The operating system performs scheduling. However, Pthreads functions are available to set priorities and alter scheduling. Each thread is given a unique thread ID upon creation.