| Title | : | Practical Support for Strong, Serializability-Based Memory Consistency |
| Speaker | : | Swarnendu Biswas (UT Austin) |
| Details | : | Fri, 5 May, 2017 10:00 AM @ DCF II |
| Abstract: | : | Writing correct and scalable multithreaded programs using shared-memory is hard because of improper synchronization, which leads to data races. Data races often indicate the presence of concurrency bugs, and have led to several high profile failures in the past, such as the Therac-25 accident, the 2003 Northeastern blackout, and the 2012 glitch in NASDAQ Facebook share prices. Unfortunately, current shared-memory languages and systems provide weak end-to-end consistency guarantees in the presence of data races. This problem of unsatisfactory semantics for racy executions needs to be resolved, but unfortunately efficient solutions have remained elusive even after years of research.
This talk describes our ongoing research to provide strong end-to-end memory consistency models for shared-memory languages and systems. I will present software-only and hardware-based approaches which provide serializability of synchronization-free regions to all program executions. A feature of our work is that it allows us to rethink the design of other system features -- such as cache coherence. Our work advances the state of the art by making the designs practical and showing that strong memory consistency is achievable. Bio: Swarnendu Biswas is currently a postdoctoral fellow working with Prof. Keshav Pingali at UT Austin. He did his PhD with Dr. Michael Bond at The Ohio State University. His graduate research work involved developing program analyses for detecting and ensuring concurrency correctness properties in multithreaded programs and memory models. He is currently working on approximate and high-performance computing. His work has been recognized with the ACM SRC Grand Finals 2016 Award, OOPSLA Distinguished Paper Award and OOPSLA Distinguished Artifact Award. Swarnendu received an MS degree from IIT Kharagpur, and did his BE from NIT Durgapur. |
