Efficient Fine-Grain Thread Migration with Active Threads (zipped postscript),
B. Weissman, B. Gomes, J. W. Quittek, M. Holtkamp
The joint 12th International Parallel Processing Symposium and 9th Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing (IPPS/SPDP 1998), March 1998, Orlando Florida.

Thread migration is established as a mechanism for achiev ing dynamic load sharing. However, fine-grained migration has not been used due to the high thread and messaging over heads. This paper describes a fine-grained thread migration system whose extensible event mechanism permits an effi cient interface between threads and communications without compromising the modularity and performance of either. Mi gration is supported by user level primitives based on which applications may implement different migration policies. The system is portable and can be used directly or serve as a compilation target for parallel languages. The system runs on a cluster of SMPs and observed performance is orders of magnitude better than other reported measurements.


Last change: 1/20/98
The Sather Team (sather@icsi.berkeley.edu)