Enabling Flexibility in the Legion Run-Time Library

This paper describes the design and implementation of the Legion run-time library (LRTL), focusing specifically on facilities that enable extensibility and configurability. These facilities include management of heterogeneous communication, an event-based mechanism for intercomponent communication, and automated memory management. The paper provides several examples that illustrate the inherent flexibility of the LRTL implementation. Keywords: configurable protocol stack, extensible run-time library, events, implicit parameters 1 Introduction The widespread deployment of gigabit networks will effectively shrink the distance between computing resources and will enable wide area distributed-object computing systems that will consist of many heterogeneous, distributed, unreliable resources. Legion [1, 2] will be one such system. Without significant software support, users will not be able to manage the complexity of this environment. Meta-systems software [3]---software that resides "abo..