Ariadne: Architecture of a Portable Threads system supporting Mobile Processes

TIrreads possess a simply expressed and powerful fonn of concurrency, easily exploitable in applications that run on both uniand multi-processors, sharcdand distributed-memory systems. This paper presents the design and implementation of Ariadne: a layered, C-based software architecture for multi-threaded computing on a variety of platfonns. Ariadne is a ponable system lhat exploils sharedand distributed-memory muhiprocessors for parallel and disuibuted applications. Thrcad-mlgralion is supported at the application level in homogeneous environments (e.g.• networks of Spares and Sequents. Intel hypercubes). Threads may migrate between processes to access remote data., typically preserving locality of reference for computations with a dynamic data space. Ariadne provides a cuslOmization layer lhrough which it can be tuned to specific applications: support for scheduling via a built-in scheduler or an application-specific scheduler, and a communication-library interface. Ariadne currently runs on the Sparc (SunDS 4.:<: and Solaris), Sequent, Intel i860, SOl, and ffiM RS6000 environments. We compare the performance of Ariadne to the Sun Iwp and Solaris lhread libraries. "Research supponcd in pan by ONR·93 10233, ARO-93GOO45 and NATO-CRG900108.

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