🚀 go-pugleaf

University of Colorado at Boulder
Department of Computer Science
ECOT 717 Engineering Center
Campus Box 430
Boulder, Colorado 803090430
(303) 4927514, FAX: (303) 4922844

CS COLLOQUIUM
Lock-Free Execution of Lock-Based-Multithreaded Programs
Ravi Rajwar
University of Wisconsin-Madison
March 18, 2002
2:00-2:50 PM
Engineering Center Classroom 200

Refreshments will be served afterwards in ECOT 832

Writing multithreaded applications requires a careful trade-off between 
programmability and performance, largely due to subtleties in coordinating 
correct access to shared data. To ensure correctness, programmers rely on 
conservative locking, often at the expense of performance. The resulting 
serialization of threads is a fundamental bottleneck to achieving high 
performance in multithreaded programs.

This talk revisits the notion of lock-free execution of multithreaded 
applications for improving their programmability and performance. In a 
lock-free execution, shared objects are not locked when accessed by 
multiple threads. I will show how a program that uses lock-based 
synchronization can be correctly executed by the hardware in a lock-free 
manner without programmer support or software changes thus exposing 
concurrency earlier hidden by the lock. This is done using modest hardware 
support and features already present in many modern computer systems. The 
benefits include improved programmability, fault-tolerance, and 
performance. The programmer still uses the familiar lock-protected critical 
section for reasoning about program correctness while getting many of the 
benefits of lock-free data structures.


Host:  John Bennett
------------------------------
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/department/events/colloquia/colloquia.html

Sign Language Interpreters Available Upon Request.  Please contact Jane 
Obrecht, Department of
Computer Science, Engineering  ECOT 722, 303-492-6101, at least five days 
prior to the colloquium.

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