SHF: Small: Precise Concurrency Exceptions: Architecture Support, Semantics and System Implications

SHF：小：精确的并发异常：架构支持、语义和系统含义

• 批准号: 1016495
• 负责人: Luis Ceze
• 金额: $ 50万
• 依托单位: University of Washington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-08-01 至 2014-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1016495&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Small; Precise; Concurrency; Exceptions

How to popularize parallel programming is one of the Computing Research Association's Grand Research Challenges for the systems community. Being able to leverage the full potential of multi-core systems would put us back into exponential growth of usable performance, as well as lead to significant power savings. Facilitating correct and efficient execution of multithreaded programs would have a transformative effect in the IT industry, as it attacks a problem at the heart of the programmability issues in multiprocessor systems. With ubiquitous multicores and emerging parallel programs, the IT industry is now dealing with far harder reliability problems. Concurrency errors are hard to understand, are typically non-deterministic and manifest themselves way past the point of their occurrence. Moreover, they have major implications for programming language semantics. Recent work on support for concurrency debugging has made good progress, but has often focused on best-effort techniques for bug detection with probabilistic guarantees. This research takes a direct approach to the problem: making concurrency errors fail-stop by delivering an exception before the error manifests itself. In other words, the system detects that a concurrency error is about to happen and will raise an exception before the code with an error is allowed to execute. The investigators call this mechanism concurrency exceptions. Concurrency exceptions will allow concurrency errors to be handled as conveniently as division by zero and segmentation fault.

如何推广并行编程是计算研究协会对系统社区的重大研究挑战之一。能够充分利用多核系统的潜力将使我们回到可用性能的指数级增长，并带来显着的功耗节省。促进多线程程序的正确和有效执行将对IT行业产生变革性影响，因为它解决了多处理器系统中可编程性问题的核心问题。随着无处不在的多核和新兴的并行程序，IT行业现在正在处理更加困难的可靠性问题。并发错误很难理解，通常是非确定性的，并且在发生时才表现出来。此外，它们对编程语言语义有重大影响。最近的工作支持并发调试取得了很好的进展，但往往集中在尽最大努力的技术，错误检测的概率保证。这项研究采取了一种直接的方法来解决这个问题：通过在错误出现之前传递异常来使并发错误失败-停止。换句话说，系统检测到并发错误即将发生，并将在允许执行错误代码之前引发异常。 研究人员称这种机制为并发异常。并发异常将允许并发错误像被零除和分段错误一样方便地处理。