Safety of program transformations in shared-memory concurrency

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• Jaroslav Sevcik (visiting from Edinburgh)
• Wednesday 27 May 2009, 11:00-12:00
• Room FW11, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Sam Staton.

NOTE UNUSUAL DAY AND TIME. There are two seminars this week, one on Wednesday, one on Friday.

Most programmers assume an interleaved semantics when reasoning about shared-memory concurrent programs. Unfortunately, even simple and widely implemented optimisations, such as constant propagation, violate the interleaved semantics. In this talk, I will argue that in absence of data races, interleaved semantics can be recovered for common classes of optimisations. My argument focuses on two classes of program transformations – eliminations and reorderings – which seem to explain most of the optimisations performed by realistic compilers.

The core of our technique is trace semantic: programs are viewed as sets of action traces and transformations as relations on tracesets. This makes the proof largely independent of concrete language details.

This talk is part of the Logic and Semantics Seminar (Computer Laboratory) series.

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