Improving the Quality of Shared-memory Concurrent Programs

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "Improving the Quality of Shared-memory Concurrent Programs"

By

Mr. Peng LIU


Abstract

Shared-memory concurrent programs are pervasive in this multi-core era. In 
these programs, programmers use the threads to concurrently access the shared 
data and use the locks to synchronize between the threads to guarantee the data 
integrity or the correctness.

Specifying the synchronization that achieves both the high performance and the 
correctness is very challenging For example, programmers may specify the overly 
restrictively synchronization, which often leads to the performance bottleneck 
because multiple threads are unnecessarily prevented from concurrently 
accessing the shared resources. On the other hand, programmers may specify the 
inadequate synchronization, which leads to concurrency bugs such as data races, 
atomicity violations and deadlocks.

We first propose two techniques, which are built upon formal models, for fixing 
the concurrency bugs in existing programs, without introducing the high 
performance overhead. Then, we propose a technique, which is based on the 
static analysis of the data structure hierarchy, for fixing the performance 
bottlenecks by unleashing more concurrency for the data structure. We also 
present our implementation and the evaluation on heavily used real world 
applications.


Date:			Tuesday, 7 January 2014

Time:			2:00pm – 4:00pm

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25/26

Chairman:		Prof. Oscar Au (ECE)

Committee Members:	Prof. Charles Zhang (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung
 			Prof. Sunghun Kim
 			Prof. Li Qiu (ECE)
                        Prof. Mary Lou Soffa (Comp. Sci., Univ. of Virginia)


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