Thread Migration in the Presence of Pointers

• Main Authors: David Cronk, Matthew Haines, Piyush Mehrotra
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 1997
• Subjects: Hampton; The Pointers
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.43.807

Dynamic migration of lightweight threads supports both data locality and load balancing. However, migrating threads that contain pointers referencing data in both the stack and heap remains an open problem. In this paper we describe a technique by which threads with pointers referencing both stack and non-shared heap data can be migrated such that the pointers remain valid after migration. As a result, threads containing pointers can now be migrated between processors in a homogeneous distributed memory environment. This work was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under NASA contract No. NAS119480 while the authors were in residence at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE), NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA 23681-0001. i 1 Introduction. A thread as a straightforward concept is a single independent sequential flow of control. A normal Unix process can generally be thought of as a single thread. Within a thread.