Jonathan Balkind will present his General Exam on May 7, 2015 at 10am in CS 301.   The members of his/her committee are David Wentzlaff (advisor), David Walker, and David August. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.  His abstract and reading list follow below. Title: "META: The Multicore Effect-Tracking Architecture" Abstract: Modern processors from smartphones to servers are seeing higher core counts in order to take advantage of increasing silicon area while reducing the processors' overall energy consumption. Unfortunately, parallelising code across general purpose cores generally imposes a software overhead which makes only larger blocks of code worthwhile to parallelise. With META, we make the observation that many functions only read and write (or have effects) to a pre-defined subset of an application's memory space. Based on this, we believe that architectural awareness of functions' effects can provide a low-overhead mechanism for parallelising existing code. META can enable the offload of fine-grain functions such as memory copies and I/O operations which would otherwise sit on the critical execution path of the main, energy intensive core. With suitable programming language and operating system support, META can bring higher level abstractions such as futures, callbacks, and work queues to the hardware level, thus reducing OS and/or runtime overheads. We evaluate the potential energy and performance improvements of META using a software simulator and implement some of the hardware structures in verilog RTL to determine the area requirements and complexity of the proposed design. Reading list: Dynamic memory disambiguation using the memory conflict buffer. David M. Gallagher, William Y. Chen, Scott A. Mahlke, John C. Gyllenhaal, and Wen-mei W. Hwu. 1994. In Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS VI). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 183-193. DOI=10.1145/195473.195534 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/195473.195534 Mondrian memory protection. Emmett Witchel, Josh Cates, and Krste Asanović. 2002. In Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS X). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 304-316. DOI=10.1145/605397.605429 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/605397.605429 Cilk: an efficient multithreaded runtime system. Robert D. Blumofe, Christopher F. Joerg, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, Charles E. Leiserson, Keith H. Randall, and Yuli Zhou. 1995. In Proceedings of the fifth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming (PPOPP '95), Richard L. Wexelblat (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 207-216. DOI=10.1145/209936.209958 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/209936.209958 Transactional memory: architectural support for lock-free data structures. Maurice Herlihy and J. Eliot B. Moss. 1993. In Proceedings of the 20th annual international symposium on computer architecture (ISCA '93). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 289-300. DOI=10.1145/165123.165164 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/165123.165164 The CHERI capability model: revisiting RISC in an age of risk. Jonathan Woodruff, Robert N.M. Watson, David Chisnall, Simon W. Moore, Jonathan Anderson, Brooks Davis, Ben Laurie, Peter G. Neumann, Robert Norton, and Michael Roe. 2014. In Proceeding of the 41st annual international symposium on Computer architecuture (ISCA '14). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 457-468. Cyclone: A Safe Dialect of C, Trevor Jim, Greg Morrisett, Dan Grossman, Michael Hicks, James Cheney, and Yanling Wang. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pages 275–288, Monterey, CA, June 2002. Tagged Memory and Minion Cores in the lowRISC SoC. Alex Bradbury, Gavin Ferris, and Robert Mullins. Memo. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, December 2014. Idempotent processor architecture. Marc de Kruijf and Karthikeyan Sankaralingam. 2011. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-44). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 140-151. DOI=10.1145/2155620.2155637 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2155620.2155637 A case for unlimited watchpoints. Joseph L. Greathouse, Hongyi Xin, Yixin Luo, and Todd Austin. 2012. In Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS XVII). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 159-172. DOI=10.1145/2150976.2150994 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2150976.2150994 Dataflow execution of sequential imperative programs on multicore architectures. Gagan Gupta and Gurindar S. Sohi. 2011. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-44). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 59-70. DOI=10.1145/2155620.2155628 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2155620.2155628 Task Superscalar: An Out-of-Order Task Pipeline. Yoav Etsion, Felipe Cabarcas, Alejandro Rico, Alex Ramirez, Rosa M. Badia, Eduard Ayguade, Jesus Labarta, and Mateo Valero. 2010. In Proceedings of the 2010 43rd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO '43). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 89-100. DOI=10.1109/MICRO.2010.13 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MICRO.2010.13 A dependency-aware task-based programming environment for multi-core architectures. Perez, J.M.; Badia, R.M.; Labarta, J., Cluster Computing, 2008 IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.142,151, Sept. 29 2008-Oct. 1 2008. DOI=10.1109/CLUSTR.2008.4663765 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CLUSTR.2008.4663765