Wed 25 May 2016 14:30 - 15:00 at Snijderszaal - Session 3 Chair(s): Laurence Tratt

Previous work has shown how to insert fences that enforce sequential consistency. However, for many concurrent algorithms, sequential consistency is unnecessarily strong and can lead to high execution overhead. The reason is that, often, correctness relies on the execution order of a few specific pairs of instructions. Algorithm designers can declare those execution orders and thereby enable memory-model-independent reasoning about correctness and also ease implementation of algorithms on multiple platforms. The literature has examples of such reasoning, while tool support for enforcing the orders has been lacking until now. In this paper we present a declarative approach to specify and enforce execution orders. Our fence insertion algorithm first identifies the execution orders that a given memory model enforces automatically, and then inserts fences that enforce the rest. Our benchmarks include three off-the-shelf transactional memory algorithms written in C/C++ for which we specify suitable execution orders. For those benchmarks, our experiments with the x86 and ARMv7 memory models show that our tool inserts fences that are competitive with those inserted by the original authors. Our tool is the first to insert fences into transactional memory algorithms and it solves the long-standing problem of how to easily port such algorithms to a novel memory model. Joint work with John Bender and Mohsen Lesani. Presented at OOPSLA 2015.

Wed 25 May

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

14:00 - 15:00
Session 3Workshop at Snijderszaal
Chair(s): Laurence Tratt King's College London
14:00
30m
Talk
Architectural Security via Capability-Based Modules in Wyvern
Workshop
Jonathan Aldrich Carnegie Mellon University
14:30
30m
Talk
Declarative fence insertion
Workshop
Jens Palsberg University of California, Los Angeles