this is worth a read

Title:
An Events Based Algorithm for Distributing Concurrent Tasks on Multi-Core Artchitetures

25 pages - pdf.

see here:
http://geonumerics.mit.edu/publications/FinalReport01.pdf


Abstract
In this paper, a programming model is presented which enables scalable parallel performance on multi-core shared memory architectures. The model has been developed for application to a wide range of numerical simulation problems. Such problems involve time stepping or iteration
algorithms where synchronization of multiple threads of execution is required. It is shown that traditional approaches to parallelism including message passing and scatter-gather can be
improved upon in terms of speed-up and memory management. Using spatial decomposition to create orthogonal computational tasks, a new task management algorithm called H-Dispatch is developed. This algorithm makes ecient use of memory resources by limiting the need for
garbage collection and takes optimal advantage of multiple cores by employing a “hungry” pull strategy. The technique is demonstrated on a simple finite dierence solver and results are compared
to traditional MPI and scatter-gather approaches. The H-Dispatch approach achieves near linear speed-up with results for eciency of 85% on a 24-core machine. It is noted that the H-Dispatch algorithm is quite general and can be applied to a wide class of computational tasks
on heterogeneous architectures involving multi-core and GPGPU hardware.