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Computer Science @ Rochester
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
10:30 AM
CSB 601
Timothy Harris
Microsoft Research, Cambridge, U.K.
Concurrency Unlocked
Major CPU vendors have abandoned designs for faster clock speeds and turned instead to packing multiple processor cores on each chip. What can we do with all of this concurrency, particularly for desktop workloads that don't provide the embarrassing parallelism that's available on server applications? Today's programming abstractions, such as locks, barriers, semaphores and condition variables just don't work for mainstream programmers: they're too difficult to use correctly and produce bugs which are subtle and hard to test for.

In this talk I'll introduce the work that I've been doing with, Maurice Herlihy, Simon Marlow and Simon Peyton Jones on concurrent programming without locks. In this work we've been building alternative abstractions based on lock-free transactional memory which we believe substantially raises the level of abstraction when developing concurrent software. It avoids the programmer needing to think about when to acquire and release locks, it avoids lock-induced deadlock and it avoids the scalability-vs-simplicity tradeoffs that are associated with lock-based design.

Bio: Tim Harris is a Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge where he works on concurrent algorithms and new abstractions for concurrent programming. Previously he was a lecturer in the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory where he gained his BA and PhD degrees. He is a co-author of the undergraduate textbook "Operating Systems" published by Pearson and is a Teaching Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK.