SHF: Medium: Collaborative Research: Run-Time Support for Scalable Concurrent Programming

高度并发的数据结构是现代多核软件的核心。该项目将为几种技术提供系统的运行时系统支持，这些技术已被证明是构建高度并发数据结构所必需的。智力上的优点是为思考如何扩展未来的硬件和软件提供了一个新的基础，特别是开发操作系统内核功能的新用途，以及事务性硬件和软件技术。项目更广泛的意义和重要性是由性能更高、成本更低和更可靠的软件提供给社会的利益。这里讨论的具体技术是非同步遍历，其中线程在链接的数据结构中导航而不写入内存，以及内存操作的原子序列，其中通过使一系列单独的内存操作看起来是瞬间发生的，从而消除了竞争条件。尽管这些技术已经成功地部署在许多特别的实例中，但它们从未被打包为通用机制，因为它们可能与标准内存管理模式进行复杂而危险的交互。该项目将利用硬件体系结构和操作系统结构的最新发展来开发自动化的、系统的运行时支持，使这些技术对非专业人员也可访问。

Highly-concurrent data structures lie at the heart of modern multicore software. This project will provide systematic run-time system support for several techniques that that have proved essential for constructing highly-concurrent data structures. The intellectual merits are to provide a new basis for thinking about how to scale future generations of both hardware and software, and in particular to develop novel uses of operating system kernel functionality, as well as transactional hardware and software techniques. The project's broader significance and importance is the benefit to society provided by higher performing, less expensive, and more reliable software.The specific techniques addressed are unsynchronized traversals, in which a thread navigates through a linked data structure without writing to memory, and atomic sequences of memory operations, where race conditions are eliminated by making a sequence of individual memory operations appear to take place instantaneously. Although these techniques have been successfully deployed in many ad-hoc instances, they have never been packaged as general-purpose mechanisms because they can have complex and dangerous interactions with standard memory management schemes. This project will exploit recent developments in hardware architectures and operating system structures to develop automated, systematic run-time support, making these techniques accessible to non-specialists.