News Archives

[Colloquium] Inefficient Performance, or Doing this faster by Doing things again

February 16, 2011

Watch Colloquium: 

M4V file (536 MB)

  • Date: Thursday, February 16, 2012 
  • Time: 11:00 am — 12:15 pm 
  • Place: Mechanical Engineering 218

Patrick Bridges
University of New Mexico Department of Computer Science

Modern systems are becoming increasingly challenging to fully leverage, especially but not exclusively at the system software level, with parallelism and reliability becoming major challenges. Current programming techniques do not address these challenges well, relying either on complex synchronization that is hard to understand, debug, analyze, and optimize, or forcing almost complete separation between cores. In this talk, I will present a new approach to programming system software for modern machines that leverages replication and redundancy to extract performance from multi-core hardware. In addition, its use of replication as a key structuring element has the potential to provide for a more reliable system that is robust in the face of failure. I describe the approach overall, discuss its novel features, advantages, and challenges, present performance numbers from work applying this approach in the context of a network protocol stack implementation, and discuss potential directions for future work.

 

Bio: Patrick Bridges is an associate professor at the University of New Mexico in the Department of Computer Science. He did his undergraduate work at Mississippi State University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in December of 2002. His research interest broadly cover operating systems and networks particularly, scaling, composition, and adaptation issues in large-scale systems. He works with collaborators at Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, IBM Research, AT&T Research, and a variety of universities.