Note this talk is now in CS 105 at 4:30-5:30pm.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [talks] Systems talk on stable multithreading, Junfeng Yang,
Monday Nov 25, 3:00pm
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 22:48:41 -0500
From: Mike Freedman
To: talks@lists.cs.princeton.edu
Speaker: Junfeng Yang, Columbia
Title: Determinism Is Not Enough: Making Parallel Programs Reliable
with Stable Multithreading
Abstract:
Our accelerating computational demand and the rise of multicore hardware
have made parallel programs, especially shared-memory multithreaded
programs, increasingly pervasive and critical. Yet, these programs
remain extremely difficult to write, test, analyze, debug, and verify.
Conventional wisdom has attributed these difficulties to nondeterminism
(i.e., repeated executions of the same program on the same input may
show different behaviors), and researchers have recently dedicated much
effort to bringing determinism into multithreading. In this talk, I
argue that determinism is not as useful as commonly perceived: it is
neither sufficient nor necessary for reliability. We present our view on
why multithreaded programs are difficult to get right, describe a
promising approach we call stable multithreading to dramatically improve
reliability, and summarize our last four years’ research on building and
applying stable multithreading systems.
Bio:
Junfeng Yang's research (http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~junfeng) centers on
making reliable and secure systems. He earned his PhD at Stanford, where
he created eXplode, a general, lightweight system for effectively
finding storage system errors. This work has led to an OSDI '04 best
paper, numerous bug fixes to real systems such as the Linux kernel, and
a featured article in Linux Weekly news. He worked at Microsoft
Research, Silicon Valley from 2007-2008, extending eXplode to check
production distributed systems. MoDist, the resultant system, is being
transferred to Microsoft product groups. He's now co-directing the
Software Systems Lab (ssl.cs.columbia.edu) at Columbia University, where
his recent work on making reliable parallel programs---the
Tern/Peregrine/Parrot stable multithreading systems--- was featured in
CACM, ACM Tech News, The Register, and many other sites. He won Sloan
and AFOSR YIP both in 2012; and NSF CAREER in 2011.
