Integrating Kernel Activations in a Multithreaded Runtime System on top of Linux

Abstract

Clusters of SMP machines are frequently used toper form heavy parallel computations, and the concepts of multithreading have proved suitable for exploiting SMP architectures. Generally, the programmer uses a thread library to write this kind of program. Such a library schedules the threads or asks the OS to do it, but both of these approaches have problems. Anderson et al. have introduced another approach which relies on cooperation between the OS scheduler and the user application using activations and up call. We have modified the Linux kernel and adapted the Marcel thread library (from the programming environment PM ²) to use activations. Improved performance was observed and problems caused by bloc king system calls were removed.