7,249 research outputs found
Continuation-Passing C: compiling threads to events through continuations
In this paper, we introduce Continuation Passing C (CPC), a programming
language for concurrent systems in which native and cooperative threads are
unified and presented to the programmer as a single abstraction. The CPC
compiler uses a compilation technique, based on the CPS transform, that yields
efficient code and an extremely lightweight representation for contexts. We
provide a proof of the correctness of our compilation scheme. We show in
particular that lambda-lifting, a common compilation technique for functional
languages, is also correct in an imperative language like C, under some
conditions enforced by the CPC compiler. The current CPC compiler is mature
enough to write substantial programs such as Hekate, a highly concurrent
BitTorrent seeder. Our benchmark results show that CPC is as efficient, while
using significantly less space, as the most efficient thread libraries
available.Comment: Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation (2012). arXiv admin note:
substantial text overlap with arXiv:1202.324
Reactive concurrent programming revisited
In this note we revisit the so-called reactive programming style, which
evolves from the synchronous programming model of the Esterel language by
weakening the assumption that the absence of an event can be detected
instantaneously. We review some research directions that have been explored
since the emergence of the reactive model ten years ago. We shall also outline
some questions that remain to be investigated
libcppa - Designing an Actor Semantic for C++11
Parallel hardware makes concurrency mandatory for efficient program
execution. However, writing concurrent software is both challenging and
error-prone. C++11 provides standard facilities for multiprogramming, such as
atomic operations with acquire/release semantics and RAII mutex locking, but
these primitives remain too low-level. Using them both correctly and
efficiently still requires expert knowledge and hand-crafting. The actor model
replaces implicit communication by sharing with an explicit message passing
mechanism. It applies to concurrency as well as distribution, and a lightweight
actor model implementation that schedules all actors in a properly
pre-dimensioned thread pool can outperform equivalent thread-based
applications. However, the actor model did not enter the domain of native
programming languages yet besides vendor-specific island solutions. With the
open source library libcppa, we want to combine the ability to build reliable
and distributed systems provided by the actor model with the performance and
resource-efficiency of C++11.Comment: 10 page
Resource Control for Synchronous Cooperative Threads
We develop new methods to statically bound the resources needed for the
execution of systems of concurrent, interactive threads. Our study is concerned
with a \emph{synchronous} model of interaction based on cooperative threads
whose execution proceeds in synchronous rounds called instants. Our
contribution is a system of compositional static analyses to guarantee that
each instant terminates and to bound the size of the values computed by the
system as a function of the size of its parameters at the beginning of the
instant. Our method generalises an approach designed for first-order functional
languages that relies on a combination of standard termination techniques for
term rewriting systems and an analysis of the size of the computed values based
on the notion of quasi-interpretation. We show that these two methods can be
combined to obtain an explicit polynomial bound on the resources needed for the
execution of the system during an instant. As a second contribution, we
introduce a virtual machine and a related bytecode thus producing a precise
description of the resources needed for the execution of a system. In this
context, we present a suitable control flow analysis that allows to formulte
the static analyses for resource control at byte code level
Automatic Verification of Message-Based Device Drivers
We develop a practical solution to the problem of automatic verification of
the interface between device drivers and the OS. Our solution relies on a
combination of improved driver architecture and verification tools. It supports
drivers written in C and can be implemented in any existing OS, which sets it
apart from previous proposals for verification-friendly drivers. Our
Linux-based evaluation shows that this methodology amplifies the power of
existing verification tools in detecting driver bugs, making it possible to
verify properties beyond the reach of traditional techniques.Comment: In Proceedings SSV 2012, arXiv:1211.587
FLICK: developing and running application-specific network services
Data centre networks are increasingly programmable, with application-specific network services proliferating, from custom load-balancers to middleboxes providing caching and aggregation. Developers must currently implement these services using traditional low-level APIs, which neither support natural operations on application data nor provide efficient performance isolation. We describe FLICK, a framework for the programming and execution of application-specific network services on multi-core CPUs. Developers write network services in the FLICK language, which offers high-level processing constructs and application-relevant data types. FLICK programs are translated automatically to efficient, parallel task graphs, implemented in C++ on top of a user-space TCP stack. Task graphs have bounded resource usage at runtime, which means that the graphs of multiple services can execute concurrently without interference using cooperative scheduling. We evaluate FLICK with several services (an HTTP load-balancer, a Memcached router and a Hadoop data aggregator), showing that it achieves good performance while reducing development effort
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