EDU.oswego.cs.dl.util.concurrent
Class FJTaskRunnerGroup

java.lang.Object
  |
  +--EDU.oswego.cs.dl.util.concurrent.FJTaskRunnerGroup
All Implemented Interfaces:
Executor

public class FJTaskRunnerGroup
extends java.lang.Object
implements Executor

A stripped down analog of a ThreadGroup used for establishing and managing FJTaskRunner threads. ThreadRunnerGroups serve as the control boundary separating the general world of normal threads from the specialized world of FJTasks.

By intent, this class does not subclass java.lang.ThreadGroup, and does not support most methods found in ThreadGroups, since they would make no sense for FJTaskRunner threads. In fact, the class does not deal with ThreadGroups at all. If you want to restrict a FJTaskRunnerGroup to a particular ThreadGroup, you can create it from within that ThreadGroup.

The main contextual parameter for a FJTaskRunnerGroup is the group size, established in the constructor. Groups must be of a fixed size. There is no way to dynamically increase or decrease the number of threads in an existing group.

In general, the group size should be equal to the number of CPUs on the system. (Unfortunately, there is no portable means of automatically detecting the number of CPUs on a JVM, so there is no good way to automate defaults.) In principle, when FJTasks are used for computation-intensive tasks, having only as many threads as CPUs should minimize bookkeeping overhead and contention, and so maximize throughput. However, because FJTaskRunners lie atop Java threads, and in turn operating system thread support and scheduling policies, it is very possible that using more threads than CPUs will improve overall throughput even though it adds to overhead. This will always be so if FJTasks are I/O bound. So it may pay to experiment a bit when tuning on particular platforms. You can also use setRunPriorities to either increase or decrease the priorities of active threads, which may interact with group size choice.

In any case, overestimating group sizes never seriously degrades performance (at least within reasonable bounds). You can also use a value less than the number of CPUs in order to reserve processing for unrelated threads.

There are two general styles for using a FJTaskRunnerGroup. You can create one group per entire program execution, for example as a static singleton, and use it for all parallel tasks:

 class Tasks {
   static FJTaskRunnerGroup group;
   public void initialize(int groupsize) {
      group = new FJTaskRunnerGroup(groupSize);
   }
   // ...
 }
 
Alternatively, you can make new groups on the fly and use them only for particular task sets. This is more flexible,, and leads to more controllable and deterministic execution patterns, but it encounters greater overhead on startup. Also, to reclaim system resources, you should call FJTaskRunnerGroup.interruptAll when you are done using one-shot groups. Otherwise, because FJTaskRunners set Thread.isDaemon status, they will not normally be reclaimed until program termination.

The main supported methods are execute, which starts a task processed by FJTaskRunner threads, and invoke, which starts one and waits for completion. For example, you might extend the above FJTasks class to support a task-based computation, say, the Fib class from the FJTask documentation:

 class Tasks { // continued
   // ...
   static int fib(int n) {
     try {
       Fib f = new Fib(n);
       group.invoke(f);
       return f.getAnswer();
     }
     catch (InterruptedException ex) {
       throw new Error("Interrupted during computation");
     }
   }
 }
 

Method stats() can be used to monitor performance. Both FJTaskRunnerGroup and FJTaskRunner may be compiled with the compile-time constant COLLECT_STATS set to false. In this case, various simple counts reported in stats() are not collected. On platforms tested, this leads to such a tiny performance improvement that there is very little motivation to bother.

[ Introduction to this package. ]

See Also:
FJTask, FJTaskRunner

Constructor Summary
FJTaskRunnerGroup(int groupSize)
          Create a FJTaskRunnerGroup with the indicated number of FJTaskRunner threads.
 
Method Summary
 void execute(java.lang.Runnable r)
          Arrange for execution of the given task by placing it in a work queue.
 void executeTask(FJTask t)
          Specialized form of execute called only from within FJTasks
 int getActiveCount()
          Return the number of threads that are not idly waiting for work.
 void interruptAll()
          Try to shut down all FJTaskRunner threads in this group by interrupting them all.
 void invoke(java.lang.Runnable r)
          Start a task and wait it out.
 void setRunPriorities(int pri)
          Set the priority to use while a FJTaskRunner is actively running tasks.
 void setScanPriorities(int pri)
          Set the priority to use while a FJTaskRunner is polling for new tasks to perform.
 int size()
          Return the number of FJTaskRunner threads in this group
 void stats()
          Prints various snapshot statistics to System.out.
 
Methods inherited from class java.lang.Object
equals, getClass, hashCode, notify, notifyAll, toString, wait, wait, wait
 

Constructor Detail

FJTaskRunnerGroup

public FJTaskRunnerGroup(int groupSize)
Create a FJTaskRunnerGroup with the indicated number of FJTaskRunner threads. Normally, the best size to use is the number of CPUs on the system.

The threads in a FJTaskRunnerGroup are created with their isDaemon status set, so do not normally need to be shut down manually upon program termination.

Method Detail

execute

public void execute(java.lang.Runnable r)
             throws java.lang.InterruptedException
Arrange for execution of the given task by placing it in a work queue. If the argument is not of type FJTask, it is embedded in a FJTask via FJTask.Wrap.

Specified by:
execute in interface Executor
Throws:
java.lang.InterruptedException - if current Thread is currently interrupted

executeTask

public void executeTask(FJTask t)
Specialized form of execute called only from within FJTasks


invoke

public void invoke(java.lang.Runnable r)
            throws java.lang.InterruptedException
Start a task and wait it out. Returns when the task completes.

Throws:
java.lang.InterruptedException - if current Thread is interrupted before completion of the task.

interruptAll

public void interruptAll()
Try to shut down all FJTaskRunner threads in this group by interrupting them all. This method is designed to be used during cleanup when it is somehow known that all threads are idle. FJTaskRunners only check for interruption when they are not otherwise processing a task (and its generated subtasks, if any), so if any threads are active, shutdown may take a while, and may lead to unpredictable task processing.


setScanPriorities

public void setScanPriorities(int pri)
Set the priority to use while a FJTaskRunner is polling for new tasks to perform. Default is currently Thread.MIN_PRIORITY+1. The value set may not go into effect immediately, but will be used at least the next time a thread scans for work.


setRunPriorities

public void setRunPriorities(int pri)
Set the priority to use while a FJTaskRunner is actively running tasks. Default is the priority that was in effect by the thread that constructed this FJTaskRunnerGroup. Setting this value while threads are running may momentarily result in them running at this priority even when idly waiting for work.


size

public int size()
Return the number of FJTaskRunner threads in this group


getActiveCount

public int getActiveCount()
Return the number of threads that are not idly waiting for work. Beware that even active threads might not be doing any useful work, but just spinning waiting for other dependent tasks. Also, since this is just a snapshot value, some tasks may be in the process of becoming idle.


stats

public void stats()
Prints various snapshot statistics to System.out.

Cautions: Some statistics are updated and gathered without synchronization, so may not be accurate. However, reported counts may be considered as lower bounds of actual values. Some values may be zero if classes are compiled with COLLECT_STATS set to false. (FJTaskRunner and FJTaskRunnerGroup classes can be independently compiled with different values of COLLECT_STATS.) Also, the counts are maintained as ints so could overflow in exceptionally long-lived applications.

These statistics can be useful when tuning algorithms or diagnosing problems. For example: