Emery berger

University of Massachusetts

Grace: safe multithreaded programming for c/c++

 

The shift from single to multiple core architectures means that programmers must write concurrent, multithreaded programs in order to increase application performance. Unfortunately, multithreaded applications are susceptible to numerous errors, including deadlocks, race conditions, atomicity violations, and order violations. These errors are notoriously difficult for programmers to debug.

 

This talk presents Grace, a software-only runtime system designed to enforce the correctness of a class of multithreaded programs: those based on fork-join parallelism. By turning threads into processes, leveraging virtual memory protection, and imposing a sequential commit protocol, Grace provides programmers with the appearance of deterministic, sequential execution, while taking advantage of available processing cores to run code concurrently and efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate Grace's effectiveness: with modest code changes (1-16 lines) across a suite of computationally-intensive benchmarks, Grace can achieve high scalability and performance while enforcing correct execution.

-- -- -- --

Emery Berger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. His research spans programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability and performance. He is the creator of various widely-used software systems including Hoard, a fast and scalable memory manager that accelerates multithreaded applications. His honors include a Microsoft Research Fellowship (2001), an NSF CAREER Award (2003), a Lilly Teaching Fellowship (2006), and a Best Paper Award at FAST 2007. Professor Berger served as General Chair of the Memory Systems Performance and Correctness 2008 workshop, and serves as an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems.

4:15pm

B17 Upson Hall

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Refreshments at 3:45pm in the Upson 4th Floor Atrium

Computer Science

& Information Science

Colloquium

Fall 2009

www.cs.cornell.edu/events/colloquium

www.cs.cornell.edu/events/colloquium