For interested readers, there's a bunch of papers on the Cilk runtime's work-stealing scheduler. The paper signa11 pointed to is one of many. They are classics

For interested readers, there's a bunch of papers on the Cilk runtime's work-stealing scheduler. The paper signa11 pointed to is one of many. They are classics in the runtime literature. Other two great papers are "Cilk: An Efficient Multithreaded Runtime System" by Blumofe et al., PPoPP 1995, http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/PPoPP95.pdf http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/PPoPP95.pdf and "The Implementation of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language", Frigo et al., PLDI 1998, http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/cilk5.pdf http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/cilk5.pdf