A Message Passing Implementation of Lazy Task Creation

Abstract. This paper describes an implementation technique for Multilisp's future construct aimed at large shared-memory multiprocessors. The technique is a variant of lazy task creation. The original implementation of lazy task creation described in Mohr, 1991] relies on efcient shared memory to distribute tasks between processors. In contrast, we propose a task distribution method based on a message passing paradigm. Its main advantages are that it is simpler to implement, has a lower cost for locally run tasks, and allows full caching of the stack on cache incoherent machines. Benchmarks on a 32 processor BBN TC2000 show that our method is more e cient than the original implementation by as much as a factor of 2.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1992
• Where: PSC
• Authors: Marc Feeley
• Keywords: Large Shared-memory Multiprocessors, Lazy Task Creation, Original Implementation, Programming Languages, PSC 1992