Arachne: A portable threads library supporting migrant threads on heterogeneous network farms

Abstract

We describe the design of an efficient and portable threads system that supports multi-threaded distributed computations on heterogeneous networks. The system enables threads to migrate between processes that run on different hardware platforms. We present a complete implementation of the design in ANSI C++. This implementation consists of a code preprocessor and a runtime library, and supports applications developed in C or C++. The runtime environment is capable of supporting tens to hundreds of thousands of threads. We also present some performance measurements on the costs of basic thread operations and thread migration.KeywordsActivation RecordProgram CounterRuntime LibraryRemote MachineSwitching OverheadThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.