Research Assistants: E. Mascarenhas and T. Brugger
Sponsors: ONR, ARO
Ariadne is a portable, user-space threads system that enables the development of concurrent applications on shared and distributed memory environments. Ariadne enables low-effort conversion of sequential programs into concurrent programs for shared or distributed memory machines. The system caters to a variety of communications environments (e.g., PVM, Conch) for the support of thread migration and distributed computation. It also supports the development of customized schedulers for shared memory multiprocessors. Scheduling of computations at the thread level offers both task- and data-driven executions. Thread migration turns remote memory accesses into local accesses, enables load balancing and simplifies distributed application development. Ariadne currently runs on the SPARC (SunOS 4.x, SunOS 5.x), Sequent Symmetry, Intel i860, Silicon Graphics IRIX, and IBM RS/6000 environments.