I'm wondering if there is a library for C++ that supports threading over the network, maybe with a threading pool and a specific protocol; or if there is just a de-facto protocol for doing threading over the network.

Thanks.

What do you mean by threading over the network?

sending threads/having_workers on machines different than the local/master machine that are connected over a network via TCP/IP

Aren't they just concurrent connections to server(s)?

connected ? yes. But how to keep them in sync and send acknowledge signals ? What about if a machine disconnects ? You need a protocol to handle all this kind of scenario.

I basically would like to use threads on any available machine connected to a network.

You need a protocol to handle all this kind of scenario.

I guess socket is what you mean.

thread doesn't know anything about network

I know that, that's why I'm asking if there are solutions that can combine both threading and networking in C++ .

well, you can run code within a thread that does some networking...

a wild guess: do you mean 'Remote procedure call':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_procedure_call

The contention would happen at the server end, not the client. Your threads would just block until the server replied, so I'm not clear where client side locking comes into it.

MPI?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface

Have a look at a product called Condor. It allows you to execute tasks remotely.