On Migrating a Distributed Application to a Multi-Threaded Environment

Light-weight computation threads in a multi-threaded operating system promise to provide low-overhead computation and fully sharable addressing space not available in conventional process-oriented operating systems. Traditional distributed applications based on processes can be re-architectured to use concurrent threads in a multi-threaded platforrn to take advantage of faster context switches and shared-memory communication.

We investigated this expectation by porting an existing distributed application to a multithreaded environment. As a result, we virtually eliminated the cost of message-based IPC, replacing it with shared-memory communication between threads.

In this paper we address the benefits, the difficulties, and the trade-offs of such a rearchitecture. We also comment on some feasible architectures for migrating currently distributed applications to multi-threaded environment.