SEECS Colloquium

We present an overview of experimental work involving the design of the Ariadne threads system, and its use in parallel simulation and communication applications. Ariadne is a portable, user-space threads system that was originally designed for applications in shared and distributed memory environments, and subsequently used to support the ParaSol process-oriented parallel simulator and the Clam communication system. Ariadne offers customized schedulers and a thread migration capability, both of which have proven useful in the development of ParaSol. Ariadne also supports cheap user-level context-switching and timing, both useful features in user-space protocol support. We present experimental results for all three systems.

Vernon Rego directs research in the Parallel Computation and Simulation Laboratory (PacsLab) in Purdue's computer sciences department. His research interests include software systems for high-performance distributed computation, network protocols, threads systems, parallel stochastic simulation, computational probability and performance, and software engineering. His current projects include the ACES software architecture for multi-threaded distributed computing and parallel simulation, including the EcliPSe replicated simulation system (for which he was awarded an IEEE/Gordon Bell Prize), the ParaSol process-oriented distributed simulation system, the Ariadne threads system and the CLAM protocol suite. He was also awarded a German Research Council Award for Computer Networking Research. He has been an invited researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories and an ACM National Lecturer. He is an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers and an advisory board member of The DoD Advanced Distributed Simulation Research Consortium.