Challenges in non-blocking synchronization

08.12.2005

Foredragsholdere
Håkan Sundell

Tid: Torsdag 8. desember 2005, kl 12:15 - 13:00
Sted: Lille auditorium, Realfagsbygget, UiTø.

Tittel: "Challenges in non-blocking synchronization"
Foredragsholder: Håkan Sundell, Department of Computing Science of Chalmers University of Technology.

Abstract:
A natural approach in multi-process programming on a shared memory platform is to communicate through abstractions like shared data structures. These are usually implemented by starting from a sequential model and then define appropriate critical sections. Unfortunately, this approach tends to scale poorly as it does not utilize the systems' built-in capability of parallelism. Moreover, if some thread should for whatever reason stop its execution when within its critical section, then none of the other threads could do progress as well. I and others have been working with an alternative approach called non-blocking synchronization. The aim of this approach is to completely avoid critical sections and instead perform the operations through the atomic machine instructions that are provided by the shared memory architecture. However, there are several complications that can make this approach very complex when designing more advanced constructions. The provided atomic primitives are usually not as powerful as one would perhaps like them to be, and various global as well as local progress criteria can be very hard to guarantee in a fully concurrent environment where every statement can be interleaved with another. Moreover, the emerging techniques of modern processors like out-of-order execution and weak memory models can make the task of designing efficient non-blocking data structures increasingly difficult. In my talk, I will introduce the basic terminology and theory about non-blocking synchronization in the context of shared data structures. I will give a survey of the current state of research in the aim of achieving efficient and practical non-blocking synchronization as well as pointing out future challenges.

Biography:
Håkan Sundell was born in 1968 in Sweden. Since 1983 he has been very active in the home computer and assembly language programming communities with special interest in emulation techniques. He received a M.Sc. degree in computer science in 1996 at Göteborg University. Between the years 1995-1999 he worked as a senior consultant and systems programmer within the Swedish tele-communication industry and multimedia community. Through a national scholarship in 1999 he started research in non-blocking synchronization and real-time systems. Together with Philippas Tsigas, he received a best paper award at IPDPS 2003 for their work with lock-free skip lists. In 2004 he received a Ph.D. degree in computer science at Chalmers University of Technology. His main research interests are in efficient synchronization for distributed systems and shared data structures.


Hvis det er faglige spørsmål i tilknytting til foredraget, vennligst ta kontakt med professor Otto J. Anshus, tlf 7764 4038.

Vel møtt!