Towards Reversible Sessions

In this work, we incorporate reversibility into structured communication-based programming, to allow parties of a session to automatically undo, in a rollback fashion, the effect of previously executed interactions. This permits taking different computation paths along the same session, as well as reverting the whole session and starting a new one. Our aim is to define a theoretical basis for examining the interplay in concurrent systems between reversible computation and session-based interaction. We thus enrich a session-based variant of pi-calculus with memory devices, dedicated to keep track of the computation history of sessions in order to reverse it. We discuss our initial investigation concerning the definition of a session type discipline for the proposed reversible calculus, and its practical advantages for static verification of safe composition in communication-centric distributed software performing reversible computations.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2014, arXiv:1406.331

To boldly go:an occam-π mission to engineer emergence

Future systems will be too complex to design and implement explicitly. Instead, we will have to learn to engineer complex behaviours indirectly: through the discovery and application of local rules of behaviour, applied to simple process components, from which desired behaviours predictably emerge through dynamic interactions between massive numbers of instances. This paper describes a process-oriented architecture for fine-grained concurrent systems that enables experiments with such indirect engineering. Examples are presented showing the differing complex behaviours that can arise from minor (non-linear) adjustments to low-level parameters, the difficulties in suppressing the emergence of unwanted (bad) behaviour, the unexpected relationships between apparently unrelated physical phenomena (shown up by their separate emergence from the same primordial process swamp) and the ability to explore and engineer completely new physics (such as force fields) by their emergence from low-level process interactions whose mechanisms can only be imagined, but not built, at the current time

Characterizing traits of coordination

How can one recognize coordination languages and technologies? As this report shows, the common approach that contrasts coordination with computation is intellectually unsound: depending on the selected understanding of the word "computation", it either captures too many or too few programming languages. Instead, we argue for objective criteria that can be used to evaluate how well programming technologies offer coordination services. Of the various criteria commonly used in this community, we are able to isolate three that are strongly characterizing: black-box componentization, which we had identified previously, but also interface extensibility and customizability of run-time optimization goals. These criteria are well matched by Intel's Concurrent Collections and AstraKahn, and also by OpenCL, POSIX and VMWare ESX.Comment: 11 pages, 3 table

The Glasgow Parallel Reduction Machine: Programming Shared-memory Many-core Systems using Parallel Task Composition

We present the Glasgow Parallel Reduction Machine (GPRM), a novel, flexible framework for parallel task-composition based many-core programming. We allow the programmer to structure programs into task code, written as C++ classes, and communication code, written in a restricted subset of C++ with functional semantics and parallel evaluation. In this paper we discuss the GPRM, the virtual machine framework that enables the parallel task composition approach. We focus the discussion on GPIR, the functional language used as the intermediate representation of the bytecode running on the GPRM. Using examples in this language we show the flexibility and power of our task composition framework. We demonstrate the potential using an implementation of a merge sort algorithm on a 64-core Tilera processor, as well as on a conventional Intel quad-core processor and an AMD 48-core processor system. We also compare our framework with OpenMP tasks in a parallel pointer chasing algorithm running on the Tilera processor. Our results show that the GPRM programs outperform the corresponding OpenMP codes on all test platforms, and can greatly facilitate writing of parallel programs, in particular non-data parallel algorithms such as reductions.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2013, arXiv:1312.221

Towards Implicit Parallel Programming for Systems

Multi-core processors require a program to be decomposable into independent parts that can execute in parallel in order to scale performance with the number of cores. But parallel programming is hard especially when the program requires state, which many system programs use for optimization, such as for example a cache to reduce disk I/O. Most prevalent parallel programming models do not support a notion of state and require the programmer to synchronize state access manually, i.e., outside the realms of an associated optimizing compiler. This prevents the compiler to introduce parallelism automatically and requires the programmer to optimize the program manually. In this dissertation, we propose a programming language/compiler co-design to provide a new programming model for implicit parallel programming with state and a compiler that can optimize the program for a parallel execution. We define the notion of a stateful function along with their composition and control structures. An example implementation of a highly scalable server shows that stateful functions smoothly integrate into existing programming language concepts, such as object-oriented programming and programming with structs. Our programming model is also highly practical and allows to gradually adapt existing code bases. As a case study, we implemented a new data processing core for the Hadoop Map/Reduce system to overcome existing performance bottlenecks. Our lambda-calculus-based compiler automatically extracts parallelism without changing the program's semantics. We added further domain-specific semantic-preserving transformations that reduce I/O calls for microservice programs. The runtime format of a program is a dataflow graph that can be executed in parallel, performs concurrent I/O and allows for non-blocking live updates

Towards Implicit Parallel Programming for Systems

Multi-core processors require a program to be decomposable into independent parts that can execute in parallel in order to scale performance with the number of cores. But parallel programming is hard especially when the program requires state, which many system programs use for optimization, such as for example a cache to reduce disk I/O. Most prevalent parallel programming models do not support a notion of state and require the programmer to synchronize state access manually, i.e., outside the realms of an associated optimizing compiler. This prevents the compiler to introduce parallelism automatically and requires the programmer to optimize the program manually. In this dissertation, we propose a programming language/compiler co-design to provide a new programming model for implicit parallel programming with state and a compiler that can optimize the program for a parallel execution. We define the notion of a stateful function along with their composition and control structures. An example implementation of a highly scalable server shows that stateful functions smoothly integrate into existing programming language concepts, such as object-oriented programming and programming with structs. Our programming model is also highly practical and allows to gradually adapt existing code bases. As a case study, we implemented a new data processing core for the Hadoop Map/Reduce system to overcome existing performance bottlenecks. Our lambda-calculus-based compiler automatically extracts parallelism without changing the program's semantics. We added further domain-specific semantic-preserving transformations that reduce I/O calls for microservice programs. The runtime format of a program is a dataflow graph that can be executed in parallel, performs concurrent I/O and allows for non-blocking live updates