A Performance Evaluation of Fine-Grain Thread Migration with Active Threads, ICSI

Thread migration is established as a mechanism for achieving dynamic load sharing and data lo-cality. However, migration has not been used with fine-grained parallelism due to the relatively high overheads associated with thread and messaging packages. This paper describes a high per-formance thread migration system for fine-grained parallelism, implemented with user level threads and user level messages. The thread system supports an extensible event mechanism which permits an efficient interface between the thread and messaging systems without compro-mising the modularity of either. Migration is supported by user level primitives; applications may implement different migration policies on top of the migration interface provided. The sys-tem is portable and can be used directly by application and library writers or serve as a compila-tion target for parallel programming languages. Detailed performance metrics are presented to evaluate the system. The system runs on a cluster of SMPs and the performance obtained is or-ders of magnitude better than other reported measurements2. 2. A shorter version of this report is accepted by IPPS/SPDP9