Lazy remote procedure call and its implementation in a parallel variant of C

Lazy task creation (LTC) is an efficient approach for executing divide and conquer parallel programs that has been used in the implementation of Multilisp's future construct. Unfortunately it requires a specialized memory management scheme, in particular for stack frames, which makes it hard to use in the context of conventional languages. We have designed a variant of LTC which has a stack management discipline that is compatible with the semantics of conventional languages. This mechanism, which we call lazy remote procedure call, has been used to implement a parallel variant of C. A first prototype of our system has been ported to shared-memory multiprocessors and network of workstations. Experimental results on a Gray T3D multiprocessor show that good performance can be achieved on several symbolic programs.