NHSE Software Catalog

Chant: A Talking Threads Package

url

http://meru.uwyo.edu/~haines/proj/chant.html

author

Matthew Haines, David Cronk, and Piyush Mehrotra

contact

Matthew Haines / haines@cs.uwyo.edu

abstract

Lightweight thread packages are seldom used in distributed memory
multiprocessors due to their inability to support direct communication
between individual threads in separate address spaces. The term talking
threads is used to represent the notion of two threads in direct
communication with each other, regardless of whether they exist in the
same address space or not.
Chant is a talking threads package capable of supporting both
point-to-point primitives and remote service requests (e.g., remote
procedure call), using standard lightweight thread and communication
libraries. Chant extends the POSIX pthreads interface to support two
new global thread objects: a chanter, which is a talking thread, and a
rope, which is a collection of chanter threads used for data parallel
computations. All communication operations follow MPI syntax and
semantics.
Chant is currently being used to support the Opus language and runtime
system, which extends HPF to support task parallel constructs. We are
also participating in the PORTS group, which is an attempt to provide a
standard for portable runtime systems which provide support for threads.

description

http://www.icase.edu/~haines/html/chant.html