Everything you always wanted to know about synchronization, but were afraid to ask

Speaker: Vasileios Trigonakis , Distributed Programming Lab, Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Switzerland

Date: Friday, November 08, 2013

Time: 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM Note: all times are in the Eastern Time Zone

Refreshments: 12:45 PM

Public: Yes

Location: D-507

Event Type:

Room Description:

Host: Nir Shavit

Contact: Linda Lynch, 617 715 2459, lindalynch@csail.mit.edu

Relevant URL: http://lpdwww.epfl.ch/rachid/

Speaker URL: None

Speaker Photo:
None

Reminders to: seminars@csail.mit.edu, theory-seminars@csail.mit.edu

Reminder Subject: TALK: Everything you always wanted to know about synchronization, but were afraid to ask

Vasileios Trigonakis is a PhD candidate in Rachid Guerraoui's group in the Distributed Programming Lab at EPFL.
Scaling software systems to many-core architectures is one of the most important challenges in computing today. A major impediment to scalability is synchronization.
Synchronization basically translates into cores slowing each other, sometimes affecting performance to the point of annihilating the overall purpose of increasing their number.
We recently performed the most exhaustive study of synchronization to date. We spanned multiple layers, from hardware cache-coherence protocols up to high-level concurrent software.
We did so on different types of architectures, from single-socket (chip multi-processor) - uniform and non-uniform - to multi-socket (multi-processor) - directory and broadcast-based - many-cores.
Our results led to a set of observations that, roughly speaking, imply that scalability of synchronization is mainly a property of the hardware.
In this talk, I will present the main results of this study and their implications on concurrent programming.

Research Areas:

Impact Areas:

This event is not part of a series.

Created by Linda Lynch at Wednesday, October 23, 2013 at 11:34 AM.