On the Design of Chant: A Talking Threads Package

Lightweight threads are becoming increasingly useful for supporting parallelism and asynchronous control structures in applications and language implementations. However, lightweight thread packages for distributed memory systems have received little attention. In this paper, we introduce the design of a runtime interface, called Chant, that supports communicating threads in a distributed memory environment. In particular, Chant is layered atop standard message passing and lightweight thread libraries, and supports efficient point-to-point and remote service request communication primitives. We examine the design issues of Chant, the efficiency of its point-to-point communication layer, and the evaluation of scheduling policies to poll for the presence of incoming messages. 1 Introduction Threads are becoming increasingly useful for supporting parallelism and asynchronous events in applications and language implementations, for both parallel and sequential machines. Threads are used i...