Login
Computer Science @ Rochester
Monday, October 03, 2011
11:00 AM
Computer Studies Bldg. 209
Maurice Herlihy
Brown University
Multicore, Transactions, and the Future of Distributed Computing
Concurrent programming models based on transactions have been around for a long time, but even today, there is a vigorous debate about what they mean and what they should do. This debate sometimes generates more heat than light: terms are not always well-defined and criteria for making judgments are not always clear.

In multicore architectures, transactional models can encompass hardware, software, speculative lock elision, and other mechanisms. The benefits sought encompass simpler implementations of highly-concurrent data structures, better software engineering for concurrent platforms and enhanced performance. This talk will try to impose some order on the conversation, and evaluate whether we are making progress.

BIO: Maurice Herlihy has an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. He served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, on the staff of DEC Cambridge Research Lab, and is currently Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. He is an ACM Fellow, and is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, and the 2004 Goedel Prize in theoretical computer science. He won the 2008 ISCA influential paper award for the 1993 paper that coined the term ``transactional memory''.

Refreshments will be provided at 10:45 AM