Why Threads?

Threaded programming models offer significant advantages over message-passing programming models along with some disadvantages as well.

• Software Portability; Threaded applications can be developed on serial machines and run on parallel machines without any changes. This ability to migrate programs between diverse architectural platforms is a very significant advantage of threaded APIs.
• Latency Hiding; One of the major overheads in programs (both serial and parallel) is the access latency for memory access, I/O, and communication. By allowing multiple threads to execute on the same processor, threaded APIs enable this latency to be hidden. In effect, while one thread is waiting for a communication operation, other threads can utilize the CPU, thus masking associated overhead.
• Scheduling and Load Balancing; While writing shared address space parallel programs, a programmer must express concurrency in a way that minimizes overheads of remote interaction and idling. While in many structured applications the task of allocating equal work to processors is easily accomplished, in unstructured and dynamic applications (such as game playing and discrete optimization) this task is more difficult. Threaded APIs allow the programmer to specify a large number of concurrent tasks and support system-level dynamic mapping of tasks to processors with a view to minimizing idling overheads. By providing this support at the system level, threaded APIs rid the programmer of the burden of explicit scheduling and load balancing.
• Ease of Programming, Widespread Use Due to the mentioned advantages, threaded programs are significantly easier to write than corresponding programs using message passing APIs. With widespread acceptance of the POSIX thread API, development tools for POSIX threads are more widely available and stable. These issues are important from the program development and software engineering aspects.

A number of vendors provide vendor-specific thread APIs. The IEEE specifies a standard 1003.1c-1995, POSIX API. Also referred to as Pthreads, POSIX has emerged as the standard threads API, supported by most vendors. The concepts themselves are largely independent of the API and can be used for programming with other thread APIs (NT threads, Solaris threads, Java threads, etc.) as well.