Active Threads: Enabling Fine-Grained Parallelism in Object-Oriented Languages (zipped postscript),
B. Weissman, B. Gomes, J. Feldman
1998 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA '98), Las Vegas, NE

Many existing object-oriented languages and new language proposals include threads to achieve high performance on modern SMPs. This paper presents Active Threads, an exten sible and portable high-performance thread system that ad dresses the runtime needs of OO languages. An event driven architecture capable of supporting different scheduling poli cies is presented. Thread scheduling that exploits the tempo ral and spatial locality is considered in detail. Active Threads is ported by retargeting the eight primitives of the Portability Interface. The system currently runs on several hardware platforms including SPARC, Intel i386 and higher, DEC Alpha AXP, HPPA and outperforms vendor thread pack ages as much as by orders of magnitude. Active Threads is used as a compilation target for Sather, a parallel object-ori ented language developed at ICSI. Active Threads is also used by a threaded distributed extension of C++.


Last change: 5/21/98
The Sather Team (sather@icsi.berkeley.edu)