Programming Techniques for Multi-Core Architectures

Contact	Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Volker Turau
Staff	Holger Machens

Project Description

The move to multi-core architectures in the end user domain currently happening forces the software industry to move to parallel programming techniques. Parallelisation is known to be a complex task and still challenging for experienced programmers as well. In the area programming techniques for multi-core architectures we are looking for techniques to ease parallel programming.

Subprojects

JTD - Java Transactional Domain

Proposed by Herlihy and Moss in the early 90th Transactional Memory is promoted as a promising candidate to solve known problems of parallel programming: Deadlocks and bad scalability shall be things of the past. Unfortunately use of transactions brings its very own problems. An example is loss of consistency when applying a technique called privatisation where the program switches from shared protected use of data by multiple threads to private unprotected use of data by one thread. In this project we are generally searching for approaches to solve those and similar problems in the use of transactional memory. We currently follow an approach providing a programming model forcing the separation of the software into a "transactional" and a "non-transactional" domain.

Publications

Holger Machens and Volker Turau. Avoiding Publication and Privatization Problems on Software Transactional Memory. In 17th GI/ITG Conference on Communication in Distributed Systems (KiVS 2011), Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik, February 2011, pp. 97–108. Kiel, Germany.

[BibTeX] [Abstract] [DOI]

@InProceedings{Telematik_MT_2011_KIVS, author = {Holger Machens and Volker Turau}, title = {Avoiding Publication and Privatization Problems on Software Transactional Memory}, booktitle = {17th GI/ITG Conference on Communication in Distributed Systems (KiVS 2011)}, pages = {97-108}, series = {OpenAccess Series in Informatics (OASIcs)}, volume = {17}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik}, day = {25}, month = feb, year = 2011, location = {Kiel, Germany}, }

Abstract: This paper presents a new approach to exclude problems arising from dynamically switching between protected concurrent and unprotected single-threaded use of shared data when using software transactional memory in OO languages such as Java. The approach is based on a simple but effective programming model separating transactions from non-transactional operation. It prevents the application programmer from errors but does not force the software transactional memory library to observe non-transactional access and thereby preserves modularity of the software. A prototypical toolchain for validation and source code instrumentation was implemented as a proof of concept.

Students' theses

Open Theses

Ongoing Theses

Interoperable Benchmark Framework for Transactional Memory