EE Seminar: Improving parallel programs with architectural insights

~~(The talk will be given in English)

Speaker:   Dr. Adam Morrison
                  CS, Technion

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015
15:00 - 16:00
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering
Improving parallel programs with architectural insights
Parallel programs and concurrent algorithms are developed using models---formal and mental---that abstract away details of the underlying hardware. In practice, however, these hidden details can have a dominating impact on performance. In this talk, I will show
how understanding hardware/software interactions can lead to more efficient programs and algorithms, through improvements of both models and hardware:
(1) I will show how understanding the implementation of the TSO memory model by x86 processors enables designing a fence-free work stealing algorithm, which was thought to be impossible.
(2) I will describe how insights on the way software uses atomic memory operations inspire a novel hardware architecture design that can break the serialization of certain contending synchronizing atomic instructions, and execute them in parallel.