Efficient thread architecture for a distributed shared memory on symmetric multiprocessor clusters

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate an efficient thread architecture for a distributed shared memory (DSM) system on symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) clusters. For DSM systems on SMP, how to utilize the processors efficiently without wasting available computational power is a major issue. In this paper, we discuss three approaches that use the process, the kernel-level thread, and the user-level thread to map application threads onto execution entities respectively. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of each method, we construct our thread package by combining both the user-level thread and the kernel-level thread. User-level threads correspond to application threads and kernel-level threads schedule these user-level threads across multiple processors. Threads are light-weighted and can be migrated in our thread package. With this thread architecture, our DSM system performs well in elementary experiments.