[talks] Systems talk on stable multithreading, Junfeng Yang, Monday Nov 25, 3:00pm

[Mike Freedman]

Speaker: Junfeng Yang, Columbia
Title: Determinism Is Not Enough: Making Parallel Programs Reliable
with Stable Multithreading
Date/time: 3-4pm on Monday November 25
Location: CS 402


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.