CPUs, network interfaces, and networks are improving, providing higher bandwidths and lower latencies. System software overhead makes it impossible for a user application to achieve bandwidths and latencies near the hardware limits. This is especially true for remote handler invocation. Typically, the remote node has to trap into the kernel and perform an expensive context switch to the handler. This hampers global communication operations and runtime systems, such as the one for Cilk and SplitC for example.

Website: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~riesen/prop/