The Filaments Research Group
One way to write a program for a parallel machine is to
create a process (thread) for each independent unit of work.
Although generally thought to be inefficient, fine-grain
programs have several advantages, including architecture independence,
clarity of expression, ease of load balancing, and ease of code
generation for parallelizing compilers.
Filaments is a software package that supports fine-grain parallelism
efficiently on shared- and distributed-memory machines.
Follow the links below for more information on Filaments
and related projects, Postscript copies of papers,
and a list of the people in the group.
A software distribution of the Filaments package was released
in September, 1998.
Follow the link at the bottom of this page for the current
status of the project, information about the distribution,
and a copy of the software.
Research Projects