Strong Memory Consistency For Parallel Programming

Correctly synchronizing multithreaded programs is challenging, and errors can lead to program failures (e.g., atomicity violations). Existing memory consistency models rule out some possible failures, but are limited by depending on subtle programmer-defined locking code and by providing unintuitive semantics for incorrectly synchronized code. Stronger memory consistency models assist programmers by providing them with easier-to-understand semantics with regard to memory access interleavings in parallel code. This dissertation proposes a new strong memory consistency model based on ordering-free regions (OFRs), which are spans of dynamic instructions between consecutive ordering constructs (e.g. barriers). Atomicity over ordering-free regions provides stronger atomicity than existing strong memory consistency models with competitive performance. Ordering-free regions also simplify programmer reasoning by limiting the potential for atomicity violations to fewer points in the program’s execution. This dissertation explores both software-only and hardware-supported systems that provide OFR serializability

Data-centric concurrency control on the java programming language

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaThe multi-core paradigm has propelled shared-memory concurrent programming to an important role in software development. Its use is however limited by the constructs that provide a layer of abstraction for synchronizing access to shared resources. Reasoning with these constructs is not trivial due to their concurrent nature. Data-races and deadlocks occur in concurrent programs, encumbering the programmer and further reducing his productivity. Even though the constructs should be as unobtrusive and intuitive as possible, performance must also be kept high compared to legacy lock-based mechanism. Failure to guarantee similar performance will hinder a system from adoption. Recent research attempts to address these issues. However, the current state of the art in concurrency control mechanisms is mostly code-centric and not intuitive. Its codecentric nature requires the specification of the zones in the code that require synchronization,contributing to the decentralization of concurrency bugs and error-proneness of the programmer. On the other hand, the only data-centric approach, AJ [VTD06], exposes excessive detail to the programmer and fails to provide complete deadlock-freedom. Given this state of the art, our proposal intends to provide the programmer a set of unobtrusive data-centric constructs. These will guarantee desirable security properties: composability, atomicity, and deadlock-freedom in all scenarios. For that purpose, a lower level mechanism (ResourceGroups) will be used. The model proposed resides on the known concept of atomic variables, the basis for our concurrency control mechanism. To infer the efficiency of our work, it is compared to Java synchronized blocks, transactional memory and AJ, where our system demonstrates a competitive performance and an equivalent level of expressivity.RepComp project(PTDC/EIA-EIA/108963/2008

ORCA: Ordering-free Regions for Consistency and Atomicity

Writing correct synchronization is one of the main difficulties of multithreaded programming. Incorrect synchronization causes many subtle concurrency errors such as data races and atomicity violations. Previous work has proposed stronger memory consistency models to rule out certain classes of concurrency bugs. However, these approaches are limited by a program’s original (and possibly incorrect) synchronization. In this work, we provide stronger guarantees than previous memory consistency models by punctuating atomicity only at ordering constructs like barriers, but not at lock operations. We describe the Ordering-free Regions for Consistency and Atomicity (ORCA) system which enforces atomicity at the granularity of ordering-free regions (OFRs). While many atomicity violations occur at finer granularity, in an empirical study of many large multithreaded workloads we find no examples of code that requires atomicity coarser than OFRs. Thus, we believe OFRs are a conservative approximation of the atomicity requirements of many programs. ORCA assists programmers by throwing an exception when OFR atomicity is threatened, and, in exception-free executions, guaranteeing that all OFRs execute atomically. In our evaluation, we show that ORCA automatically prevents real concurrency bugs. A user-study of ORCA demonstrates that synchronizing a program with ORCA is easier than using a data race detector. We evaluate modest hardware support that allows ORCA to run with just 18% slowdown on average over pthreads, with very similar scalability

Modularizing and Specifying Protocols among Threads

We identify three problems with current techniques for implementing protocols among threads, which complicate and impair the scalability of multicore software development: implementing synchronization, implementing coordination, and modularizing protocols. To mend these deficiencies, we argue for the use of domain-specific languages (DSL) based on existing models of concurrency. To demonstrate the feasibility of this proposal, we explain how to use the model of concurrency Reo as a high-level protocol DSL, which offers appropriate abstractions and a natural separation of protocols and computations. We describe a Reo-to-Java compiler and illustrate its use through examples.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2012, arXiv:1302.579