Scalable Reliable SD Erlang Design

This technical report presents the design of Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang: a set of language-level changes that aims to enable Distributed Erlang to scale for server applications on commodity hardware with at most 100,000 cores. We cover a number of aspects, specifically anticipated architecture, anticipated failures, scalable data structures, and scalable computation. Other two components that guided us in the design of SD Erlang are design principles and typical Erlang applications. The design principles summarise the type of modifications we aim to allow Erlang scalability. Erlang exemplars help us to identify the main Erlang scalability issues and hypothetically validate the SD Erlang design

A Concurrency and Time Centered Framework for Certification of Autonomous Space Systems

Future space missions, such as Mars Science Laboratory, suggest the engineering of some of the most complex man-rated autonomous software systems. The present process-oriented certification methodologies are becoming prohibitively expensive and do not reach the level of detail of providing guidelines for the development and validation of concurrent software. Time and concurrency are the most critical notions in an autonomous space system. In this work we present the design and implementation of the first concurrency and time centered framework for product-oriented software certification of autonomous space systems. To achieve fast and reliable concurrent interactions, we define and apply the notion of Semantically Enhanced Containers (SEC). SECs are data structures that are designed to provide the flexibility and usability of the popular ISO C++ STL containers, while at the same time they are hand-crafted to guarantee domain-specific policies, such as conformance to a given concurrency model. The application of nonblocking programming techniques is critical to the implementation of our SEC containers. Lock-free algorithms help avoid the hazards of deadlock, livelock, and priority inversion, and at the same time deliver fast and scalable performance. Practical lock-free algorithms are notoriously difficult to design and implement and pose a number of hard problems such as ABA avoidance, high complexity, portability, and meeting the linearizability correctness requirements. This dissertation presents the design of the first lock-free dynamically resizable array. Our approach o ers a set of practical, portable, lock-free, and linearizable STL vector operations and a fast and space effcient implementation when compared to the alternative lock- and STM-based techniques. Currently, the literature does not offer an explicit analysis of the ABA problem, its relation to the most commonly applied nonblocking programming techniques, and the possibilities for its detection and avoidance. Eliminating the hazards of ABA is left to the ingenuity of the software designer. We present a generic and practical solution to the fundamental ABA problem for lock-free descriptor-based designs. To enable our SEC container with the property of validating domain-specific invariants, we present Basic Query, our expression template-based library for statically extracting semantic information from C++ source code. The use of static analysis allows for a far more efficient implementation of our nonblocking containers than would have been otherwise possible when relying on the traditional run-time based techniques. Shared data in a real-time cyber-physical system can often be polymorphic (as is the case with a number of components part of the Mission Data System's Data Management Services). The use of dynamic cast is important in the design of autonomous real-time systems since the operation allows for a direct representation of the management and behavior of polymorphic data. To allow for the application of dynamic cast in mission critical code, we validate and improve a methodology for constant-time dynamic cast that shifts the complexity of the operation to the compiler's static checker. In a case study that demonstrates the applicability of the programming and validation techniques of our certification framework, we show the process of verification and semantic parallelization of the Mission Data System's (MDS) Goal Networks. MDS provides an experimental platform for testing and development of autonomous real-time flight applications

CPHASH: A cache-partitioned hash table

CPHash is a concurrent hash table for multicore processors. CPHash partitions its table across the caches of cores and uses message passing to transfer lookups/inserts to a partition. CPHash's message passing avoids the need for locks, pipelines batches of asynchronous messages, and packs multiple messages into a single cache line transfer. Experiments on a 80-core machine with 2 hardware threads per core show that CPHash has ~1.6x higher throughput than a hash table implemented using fine-grained locks. An analysis shows that CPHash wins because it experiences fewer cache misses and its cache misses are less expensive, because of less contention for the on-chip interconnect and DRAM. CPServer, a key/value cache server using CPHash, achieves ~5% higher throughput than a key/value cache server that uses a hash table with fine-grained locks, but both achieve better throughput and scalability than memcached. The throughput of CPHash and CPServer also scale near-linearly with the number of cores.Quanta Computer (Firm)National Science Foundation (U.S.). (Award 915164

Mechanisms for Unbounded, Conflict-Robust Hardware Transactional Memory

Conventional lock implementations serialize access to critical sections guarded by the same lock, presenting programmers with a difficult tradeoff between granularity of synchronization and amount of parallelism realized. Recently, researchers have been investigating an emerging synchronization mechanism called transactional memory as an alternative to such conventional lock-based synchronization. Memory transactions have the semantics of executing in isolation from one another while in reality executing speculatively in parallel, aborting when necessary to maintain the appearance of isolation. This combination of coarse-grained isolation and optimistic parallelism has the potential to ease the tradeoff presented by lock-based programming. This dissertation studies the hardware implementation of transactional memory, making three main contributions. First, we propose the permissions-only cache, a mechanism that efficiently increases the size of transactions that can be handled in the local cache hierarchy to optimize performance. Second, we propose OneTM, an unbounded hardware transactional memory system that serializes transactions that escape the local cache hierarchy. Finally, we propose RetCon, a novel mechanism for detecting conflicts that reduces conflicts by allowing transactions to commit with different values than those with which they executed as long as dataflow and control-flow constraints are maintained

A distributed architecture for mobile, location-dependent applications

Thesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 56-58).As pervasive computing becomes a reality, users will be able to interact with computing services which will all work together in a seamlessly integrated system. Resource discovery is a key feature of pervasive computing which allows users simple and convenient access to resources. While there are several resource discovery systems in existence which are essential to pervasive computing, the support for location-based resource discovery is uncommon. The goal of this work is to integrate a location-support system with a resource discovery system to support location-based resource discovery. Our integrated system provides an in-building solution which is cost-effective, scalable, and distributed. In order to protect the user's privacy, the system provides location discovery services without receiving any information from the user. We have also implemented a simple scripting language which thin clients can use to control and interact with network services. To demonstrate the power and functionality of this system, we have deployed several location-dependent applications including a map-based service discovery application with little manual configuration.by Anit Chakraborty.M.Eng