16,193 research outputs found
Deterministic Consistency: A Programming Model for Shared Memory Parallelism
The difficulty of developing reliable parallel software is generating
interest in deterministic environments, where a given program and input can
yield only one possible result. Languages or type systems can enforce
determinism in new code, and runtime systems can impose synthetic schedules on
legacy parallel code. To parallelize existing serial code, however, we would
like a programming model that is naturally deterministic without language
restrictions or artificial scheduling. We propose "deterministic consistency",
a parallel programming model as easy to understand as the "parallel assignment"
construct in sequential languages such as Perl and JavaScript, where concurrent
threads always read their inputs before writing shared outputs. DC supports
common data- and task-parallel synchronization abstractions such as fork/join
and barriers, as well as non-hierarchical structures such as producer/consumer
pipelines and futures. A preliminary prototype suggests that software-only
implementations of DC can run applications written for popular parallel
environments such as OpenMP with low (<10%) overhead for some applications.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure
A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs
The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrent
applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicate
through asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thereby, they avoid
concurrency bugs such as data races, but are not immune to concurrency bugs in
general. This study taxonomizes concurrency bugs in actor-based programs
reported in literature. Furthermore, it analyzes the bugs to identify the
patterns causing them as well as their observable behavior. Based on this
taxonomy, we further analyze the literature and find that current approaches to
static analysis and testing focus on communication deadlocks and message
protocol violations. However, they do not provide solutions to identify
livelocks and behavioral deadlocks. The insights obtained in this study can be
used to improve debugging support for actor-based programs with new debugging
techniques to identify the root cause of complex concurrency bugs.Comment: - Submitted for review - Removed section 6 "Research Roadmap for
Debuggers", its content was summarized in the Future Work section - Added
references for section 1, section 3, section 4.3 and section 5.1 - Updated
citation
Fast Cross-Validation via Sequential Testing
With the increasing size of today's data sets, finding the right parameter
configuration in model selection via cross-validation can be an extremely
time-consuming task. In this paper we propose an improved cross-validation
procedure which uses nonparametric testing coupled with sequential analysis to
determine the best parameter set on linearly increasing subsets of the data. By
eliminating underperforming candidates quickly and keeping promising candidates
as long as possible, the method speeds up the computation while preserving the
capability of the full cross-validation. Theoretical considerations underline
the statistical power of our procedure. The experimental evaluation shows that
our method reduces the computation time by a factor of up to 120 compared to a
full cross-validation with a negligible impact on the accuracy
Dynamic Choreographies - Safe Runtime Updates of Distributed Applications
Programming distributed applications free from communication deadlocks and
races is complex. Preserving these properties when applications are updated at
runtime is even harder. We present DIOC, a language for programming distributed
applications that are free from deadlocks and races by construction. A DIOC
program describes a whole distributed application as a unique entity
(choreography). DIOC allows the programmer to specify which parts of the
application can be updated. At runtime, these parts may be replaced by new DIOC
fragments from outside the application. DIOC programs are compiled, generating
code for each site, in a lower-level language called DPOC. We formalise both
DIOC and DPOC semantics as labelled transition systems and prove the
correctness of the compilation as a trace equivalence result. As corollaries,
DPOC applications are free from communication deadlocks and races, even in
presence of runtime updates.Comment: Technical Repor
Dynamic Choreographies: Theory And Implementation
Programming distributed applications free from communication deadlocks and
race conditions is complex. Preserving these properties when applications are
updated at runtime is even harder. We present a choreographic approach for
programming updatable, distributed applications. We define a choreography
language, called Dynamic Interaction-Oriented Choreography (AIOC), that allows
the programmer to specify, from a global viewpoint, which parts of the
application can be updated. At runtime, these parts may be replaced by new AIOC
fragments from outside the application. AIOC programs are compiled, generating
code for each participant in a process-level language called Dynamic
Process-Oriented Choreographies (APOC). We prove that APOC distributed
applications generated from AIOC specifications are deadlock free and race free
and that these properties hold also after any runtime update. We instantiate
the theoretical model above into a programming framework called Adaptable
Interaction-Oriented Choreographies in Jolie (AIOCJ) that comprises an
integrated development environment, a compiler from an extension of AIOCs to
distributed Jolie programs, and a runtime environment to support their
execution.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1407.097
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