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SUMMARY:A Runtime System for Software Lock Elision - Amitabha Roy (Univers
 ity of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20090326T163000Z
DTEND:20090326T170000Z
UID:TALK16267@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Eiko Yoneki
DESCRIPTION:The advent of multi-core processors means that exploiting para
 llelism is key to increasing the performance of programs.  Many researcher
 s have studied the use of atomic blocks as a way to simplify the construct
 ion of scalable parallel programs.  However\, there is a large body of exi
 sting lock-based code\, and typically it is incorrect to simply replace lo
 ck-based critical sections with atomic blocks.  Some problems include the 
 need to do IO within critical sections\; the use of primitives such as con
 dition variables\; and the sometime reliance on underlying lock properties
  such as fairness or priority inheritance.\n\nIn this talk I will present 
 an alternative: a software runtime system that allows threads to speculati
 vely execute lock-based critical sections in parallel.  Execution proceeds
  optimistically\, dynamically detecting conflicts between accesses by conc
 urrent threads.\n\nHowever\, if there are frequent conflicts\, or if there
  are attempts to perform operations that cannot be done speculatively\, th
 en execution can fall back to acquiring a lock.  The runtime system has be
 en designed with the requirements of systems code in mind: in particular i
 t does not require that programs be written in type-safe languages\, nor d
 oes it require any form of garbage collection. Furthermore\, it never requ
 ires a thread to block at any point other than a held lock\, thereby retai
 ning locking semantics that are familiar to programmers.\n\n\n\nBio: I am 
 a second year PhD student in the Systems Research Group at the Computer La
 boratory. I am supervised by Steven Hand from the lab and Tim Harris from 
 Microsoft Research. Prior to this I have worked on memory consistency veri
 fication and performance modeling at Intel. I received my masters degree i
 n computer science at the Indian Institute of Science\, Bangalore.\n
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory\, William Gates Builiding
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