Efficient Runtime Support for Concurrent Objects: the Illinois Concert System
 
                           Andrew A. Chien
        Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois
                   and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
 
                               Abstract
 
Over the past four years, the Illinois Concert project has developed a
variety of compiler and runtime techniques which enable high
performance execution of concurrent object programs.  In particular,
programs with fine-grained computation, communication, and concurrency
can be executed with surprisingly high efficiency on stock hardware.
We will discuss the high performance runtime techniques, present
performance results, and discuss limits to performance in current and
future systems.  Performance highlights include: thread
create/schedule/delete 2.25us, future create and synchronize 0.77us,
message send/receive 2.5us.  Together, these primitives support
efficient execution against a global namespace with threads as small
20 us.
 
More information is available from http://www-csag.cs.uiuc.edu/
 
ANDREW A. CHIEN's research involves the interaction of languages,
compilers, system software, and architecture in high-performance
systems.  He is currently on sabbatical at Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories, on leave from the University of Illinois where he is an
Associate Professor of Computer Science with joint appointments with
Electrical and Computer Engineering and as a research scientist in the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications.  His current projects
include the Illinois Concert System, Fast Messages, and High
Performance Virtual Machines. Andrew received his undergraduate,
master's, and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.