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I'm giving a talk on concurrency which will cover multithreading, multiprocessing and green threads. I'd like to give simple real-world analogies of single threaded programs, multithreading, multiprocessing, and green threads. These are the analogies I've come up with:

  1. Single kernel thread - A single line of customers in a bank queuing up and being served by a single bank teller.
  2. Kernel multithreading - A single line of customers being served by two bank tellers.
  3. Multiprocessing - Two lines of customers being served by two bank tellers. (Or alternatively, two separate banks, each with a single line of customers being served by a single teller.)
  4. Green threads - A receptionist who is taking large numbers of calls and placing people on hold while they deal with other calls.

I don't really like the green threads analogy because (1) the people on hold are "blocking" rather than doing useful work; and (2) it is not consistent with the other bank teller analogies.

Anyone have any simple analogies that can help to explain green threads?

aco
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3 Answers3

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It doesn't really make sense to include green threads in the same list as the other three, since they live on different levels of abstraction. Multithreading and multiprocessing are two different models of dealing with data sharing between concurrent entities (shared memory vs. separate memory with explicit communication).

Green threads on the other hand, are a way of implementing multithreading. One of many possible ways, actually.

If multithreading is implemented inside the CPU, we call it chip multithreading (CMT) if it is coarse-grained (e.g. on the T-series family of SPARC CPUs), and simultaneous multithreading (SMT) if it is fine-grained (e.g. on the Intel Xeon and Pentium4, under Intel's marketing name "HyperThreading Technology"). If it is implemented inside the Operating System, we call it Kernel Threading. If it is implemented at a higher level, we call it Green Threading. But it is all just different implementations of the same idea.

Jörg W Mittag
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Green threads would be a bank teller filing a transaction, then telling the customer to go back to the end of the line because someone on another floor needs to approve a particular part before they can continue.

This would probably work better if it involved paperwork that could be either carried around by the "tellers" (user threads & processes) or the "customers" (green threads). Banking doesn't work well with this unless you're assuming a very busy loan department.

aerohammer
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Since it's fine to use a different style of examples, and it's that time of year in America, lets use taxes! Note that I left the old response, since this one is rather different...

A Green Thread is like doing your personal taxes and your business taxes yourself... as a mad scientist. You fill in the paperwork, schedule the time spent from what you have available to you, delay things because you need to go get more records, resume work that you left unfinished the day before, etc. All by yourself, except that you don't notice, because each time you change what you're doing, you pull out your brain and stick a different one in, thereby forgetting what you were doing until you swap that brain back in. Let Igor's brain handle the baking, you'll handle the eating!

A single Platform thread , whether an OS thread, a hardware thread, or more commonly a hardware thread used by the OS to implement an OS thread, does work differently. As far as you can tell, you just keep working on something thing until you decide not to. However, you don't have to decide to switch to something else as often, because the Platform (Doctor Frankenstein!) will sometimes do that for you (the Monster!), swapping your current brain with another (often Igor! But sometimes Bob from next door) without telling you. Stuff that needs fast reactions (Igor, the cake is burning!) is usually expected to get first dibs whenever this happens. Note that you can chose to run a Green Thread within a Platform Thread, but it's pretty hard to think of a scenario where it CAN'T be claimed that all Green Threads run inside one or more Process Threads. Regardless, the "special unicorn magic" is that you are no longer making the decision to swap brains threads.

Two or more Platform Threads is like a single Platform Thread, except that there now appear to be two+ bodies, thus two+ brains, so you can choose to have different brains do different jobs (Two Igors mean twice as many cakes)!

Multi-processing is when there are multiple sets of brains, and the body(-ies) get moved around to different places by one (or more) of the brains, so that brains in one set never wind up in places that are restricted to another set of brains (the Villagers will never know!).

aerohammer
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