Distributed Sequential Computing

Sequential computations can benefit from distributed computing through the use of self-migrating threads. On large problems, significant performance improvement is achieved by eliminating disk paging completely, trading off against a modest amount of data communication. The key idea is to have computation and small-sized data move to meet with large-sized data rather than the other way around. Using self-migrating threads with strong mobility provides a flexible way of grouping computations into programs. One of the benefits of this flexibility is ease of applicationlevel programming. Sequential programs are easily augmented into distributed sequential programs for solving large problems, and the distributed sequential programs serve as a good starting point for incremental parallelization. Using our self-migrating threads to implement distributed sequential programs is almost as efficient as using message passing, because we have made thread migration almost as efficient as message passing.