IronPort developed a stackless threading model that allows the IronPort appliance to support more than 10,000 simultaneous connections in contrast to the 100 connections supported on a traditional OS.
If one wanted to do the same but to make it open source, where should they start?
There are some implementations already available. Just do some digging around and you can find them. One of the most prevalent implementations is available under a BSD license: Protothreads
What you need is coroutines http://www.nightmare.com/~rushing/copython/index.html