The CLAM approach to multithreaded communication on shared-memory multiprocessors: design and experiments

We present results on the experimental design and development of a Connectionless, Lightweight, and Multiway (CLAM) communications environment. The system provides efficient and scalable multiprotocol support for distributed applications that use multimodal data. We present motivation behind design decisions for the CLAM system, and describe two simple, but effective scheduling algorithms for the simultaneous support of multiple, threads-based user-space protocols. One algorithm is readily portable to shared-memory multiprocessors, and enables two or more protocols to coexist within an OS-level process. We present experimental results on the performance of both algorithms.