ActiveMonitor: Asynchronous Monitor Framework for Scalability and Multi-Object Synchronization

Monitor objects are used extensively for thread-safety and synchronization in shared memory parallel programs. They provide ease of use, and enable straightforward correctness analysis. However, they inhibit parallelism by enforcing serial executions of critical sections, and thus the performance of parallel programs with monitors scales poorly with number of processes. Their current design and implementation is also ill-suited for thread synchronization across multiple thread-safe objects. We present ActiveMonitor - a framework that allows multi-object synchronization without global locks, and improves parallelism by exploiting asynchronous execution of critical sections. We evaluate the performance of Java based implementation of ActiveMonitor on micro-benchmarks involving light and heavy critical sections, as well as on single-source-shortest-path problem in directed graphs. Our results show that on most of these problems, ActiveMonitor based programs outperform programs implemented using Java\u27s reentrant-lock and condition constructs

Brief Announcement: Persistent Software Combining

We study the performance power of software combining in designing recoverable algorithms and data structures. We present two recoverable synchronization protocols, one blocking and another wait-free, which illustrate how to use software combining to achieve both low persistence and synchronization cost. Our experiments show that these protocols outperform by far state-of-the-art recoverable universal constructions and transactional memory systems. We built recoverable queues and stacks, based on these protocols, that exhibit much better performance than previous such implementations

A Distributed Frank-Wolfe Algorithm for Communication-Efficient Sparse Learning

Learning sparse combinations is a frequent theme in machine learning. In this paper, we study its associated optimization problem in the distributed setting where the elements to be combined are not centrally located but spread over a network. We address the key challenges of balancing communication costs and optimization errors. To this end, we propose a distributed Frank-Wolfe (dFW) algorithm. We obtain theoretical guarantees on the optimization error $\epsilon$ and communication cost that do not depend on the total number of combining elements. We further show that the communication cost of dFW is optimal by deriving a lower-bound on the communication cost required to construct an $\epsilon$-approximate solution. We validate our theoretical analysis with empirical studies on synthetic and real-world data, which demonstrate that dFW outperforms both baselines and competing methods. We also study the performance of dFW when the conditions of our analysis are relaxed, and show that dFW is fairly robust.Comment: Extended version of the SIAM Data Mining 2015 pape

Optimization of thread affinity and memory affinity for remote core locking synchronization in multithreaded programs for multicore computer systems

This paper proposes the algorithms for optimization of Remote Core Locking (RCL) synchronization method in multithreaded programs. The algorithm of initialization of RCL-locks and the algorithms for threads affinity optimization are developed. The algorithms consider the structures of hierarchical computer systems and non-uniform memory access (NUMA) to minimize execution time of RCL-programs. The experimental results on multi-core computer systems represented in the paper shows the reduction of RCL-programs execution time

Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks: A MAC Layer Perspective

The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band is seen as a key enabler of multi-gigabit wireless access in future cellular networks. In order to overcome the propagation challenges, mmWave systems use a large number of antenna elements both at the base station and at the user equipment, which lead to high directivity gains, fully-directional communications, and possible noise-limited operations. The fundamental differences between mmWave networks and traditional ones challenge the classical design constraints, objectives, and available degrees of freedom. This paper addresses the implications that highly directional communication has on the design of an efficient medium access control (MAC) layer. The paper discusses key MAC layer issues, such as synchronization, random access, handover, channelization, interference management, scheduling, and association. The paper provides an integrated view on MAC layer issues for cellular networks, identifies new challenges and tradeoffs, and provides novel insights and solution approaches.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication