[Colloq] Hiring Talk - MONDAY, MARCH 13 - Bill Scherer

[Rachel Kalweit]

The College of Computer and Information Science Presents
A Hiring Talk by:
Bill Scherer
University of Rochester

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

Title:
Synchronization and Concurrency in User-level Software Systems

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