Wool-A work stealing library

Abstract

This paper presents some preliminary results on a small light weight user level task management library called Wool. The Wool task scheduler is based on work stealing. The objective of the library is to provide a reasonably convenient programming interface (in particular by not forcing the programmer to write in continuation passing style) in ordinary C while still having a very low task creation overhead. Several task scheduling systems based on work stealing exists, but they are typically either programming languages like Cilk-5 or based on C++ like the Intel TBB or C# as in the Microsoft TPL. Our main conclusions are that such a direct style interface is indeed possible and yields performance that is comparable to that of the Intel TBB.