As the complexity and scale of modern parallel machines continue to grow, programmers increasingly rely on composition of software libraries to encapsulate and exploit parallelism. However, many libraries are not designed with composition in mind and assume they have exclusive access to all resources. Using such libraries concurrently can result in contention and degraded performance. Prior solutions involve modifying the libraries or the OS, which is often infeasible. We propose Virtual Library Contexts (VLCs), which are process subunits that encapsulate sets of libraries and associated resource allocations. VLCs control the resource utilization of these libraries without modifying library code. This enables the user to partition resources between libraries to prevent contention, or load multiple copies of the same library to allow parallel execution of otherwise thread-unsafe code within the same process. In this paper, we describe and evaluate C++ and Python prototypes of VLCs. Experiments show VLCs enable a speedup up to 2.85x on benchmarks including applications using OpenMP, OpenBLAS, and LibTorch. Source code of VLCs is available at https://github.com/pecos/Virtual-Library-Context.
@article{arxiv.2512.04320,
title = {VLCs: Managing Parallelism with Virtualized Libraries},
author = {Yineng Yan and William Ruys and Hochan Lee and Ian Henriksen and Arthur Peters and Sean Stephens and Bozhi You and Henrique Fingler and Martin Burtscher and Milos Gligoric and Keshav Pingali and Mattan Erez and George Biros and Christopher J. Rossbach},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.04320},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC '25)