[Crib-list] Speaker: Alex Kogan (Oracle Labs) -- JOINT Event: "Theory of Computation Seminar" and "Computational Research in Boston and Beyond Seminar" -- Friday, December 6, 2013 -- TIME: 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM -- LOCATION: Stata Building 32, Room G882 (Hewlett Room)

[Shirley Entzminger]

 				Joint Event

 			Theory of Computation Seminar
 				   and
 		Computational Research in Boston and Beyond Seminar


NOTE:  Time/Location
--------------------

DATE:		Friday, December 6, 2013
TIME:		1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
LOCATION:	Building 32, Room G882 (Hewlett Room)
HOST:		Nir Shavit & Jeremy Kepner

 	[Refreshments provided at 12:45 PM inside Room 32-G882.]


TITLE:		Message Passing or Shared Memory:
 		Evaluating the Delegation Abstraction for Multicores


SPEAKER:	Alex Kogan (Oracle Labs)

ABSTRACT:

Even for small multi-core systems, it has become harder and harder
to support a simple shared memory abstraction. Processors access some
memory regions more quickly than others, which is a phenomenon called
"non-uniform memory access" (NUMA). These trends have prompted researchers
to investigate alternative programming abstractions based on message
passing rather than cache-coherent shared memory.  To advance a pragmatic
understanding of these models' strengths and weaknesses, we have explored
a range of different message passing and shared memory designs, for a
variety of concurrent data structures, running on different multi-core
architectures.  Our goal was to evaluate which combinations perform best
and where simple software or hardware optimizations might have the most
impact.  We observe that different approaches perform best in different
circumstances, and that the communication overhead of message passing can
often outweigh its benefits.  Nonetheless, we discuss ways in which
this balance may shift in the future.  Overall, we conclude that, by
emphasizing high-level shared data abstractions, software should be
designed to be largely independent of the choice of low-level
communication mechanism.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA


For more information please contact: Linda Lynch, 617-715-2459