Efficient Fine-Grain Thread Migration with Active Threads

Thread migration is established as a mechanism for achieving dynamic load sharing. However, fine-grained migration has not been used due to the high thread and messaging overheads. This paper describes a fine-grained thread migration system whose extensible event mechanism permits an efficient interface between threads and communications without compromising the modularity and performance of either. Migration is supported by user level primitives based on which applications may implement different migration policies. The system is portable and can be used directly or serve as a compilation target for parallel languages. The system runs on a cluster of SMPs and observed performance is orders of magnitude better than other reported measurements.