http://meru.uwyo.edu/~haines/proj/chant.html Chant: A Talking Threads Package <author>Matthew Haines, David Cronk, and Piyush Mehrotra <contact>Matthew Haines / haines@cs.uwyo.edu <abstract> Lightweight thread packages are seldom used in distributed memory multiprocessors due to their inability to support direct communication between individual threads in separate address spaces. The term talking threads is used to represent the notion of two threads in direct communication with each other, regardless of whether they exist in the same address space or not. Chant is a talking threads package capable of supporting both point-to-point primitives and remote service requests (e.g., remote procedure call), using standard lightweight thread and communication libraries. Chant extends the POSIX pthreads interface to support two new global thread objects: a chanter, which is a talking thread, and a rope, which is a collection of chanter threads used for data parallel computations. All communication operations follow MPI syntax and semantics. Chant is currently being used to support the Opus language and runtime system, which extends HPF to support task parallel constructs. We are also participating in the PORTS group, which is an attempt to provide a standard for portable runtime systems which provide support for threads. <description><url>http://www.icase.edu/~haines/html/chant.html</url> <category>ppt-rts </urc>