The JCilk-1 runtime system

JCilk extends the Java language to provide call-return semantics for multithreading, much as Cilk does for C. Java's built-in thread model does not support the passing of exceptions or return values from one thread back to the "parent" thread that created it. JCilk imports Cilk's fork-join primitives spawn and sync into Java to provide procedure-call semantics for concurrent subcomputations. It also introduces exceptions into that fork-join structure, leading to some some surprising semantic synergies. In particular, JCilk extends Java's exception semantics to allow exceptions to be passed from a spawned method to its parent in a natural way that obviates the need for Cilk's inlet and abort constructs. When executing in parallel, an exception thrown by a JCilk computation signals its "side computations" to abort, which yields a clean semantics in which only a single exception from the enclosing try block is handled. Because JCilk uses Java's normal exception mechanism to propagate an abort throughout the side computations, the programmer can handle clean-up by simply catching a thrown CilkAbort exception.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Danaher, John (John Stephen)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Charles E. Leiserson.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36762

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/36762