[Colloq] Hiring Talk: Bill Scherer, Univ of Rochester, Monday, March 13

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

Presents a Hiring Talk by:
William Scherer
University of Rochester

Who will speak on:
Synchronization and Concurrency in User-level Software Systems

Monday, March 13, 2006
12:00pm
366 West Village H
Northeastern University

Abstract:

Concurrency in user applications is on the rise.  Modern computers have 
multiple hardware threads per processor and multiple processors per 
chip, each of which may switch to a different software thread many times 
per second.  Applications of the future will be heavily multithreaded. 
My research aims to make such programs easier to write and more 
resilient to the performance programs historically caused by preemption. 
  After surveying work in several areas (including preemption-tolerant 
locks and contention management for software transactional memory) I 
will focus in this talk on dual data structures, which extend the 
utility and performance of concurrent libraries.

Traditional fine-grain locking is prone to deadlock, non-composability, 
priority inversion, convoying, and intolerance of thread failure, 
preemption, and even page faults.  Nonblocking algorithms avoid these 
limitations by ensuring that the delay or failure of a thread never 
prevents the system as a whole from making forward progress.  We broaden 
the range of known nonblocking algorithms by introducing a design 
methodology that supports partial operations in concurrent objects with 
standard linearizability theory. We define dual data structures as 
concurrent objects that may hold data and requests.  We present 
lock-free versions of several dual data structures, including dual 
stacks, dual queues, exchangers, and synchronous queues.  Our exchangers 
and synchronous queues will appear in Java 6.

Host: Jay Aslam