CAREER: A Task-Parallel Platform for Interactive Applications

现代软件倾向于面向服务、长期运行和交互。交互可以是外部的，例如等待用户输入或网络包，也可以是内部的，其中组成应用程序的组件彼此交互，通常是异步的。交互应用在商用多核硬件上快速运行非常重要，因为快速交互会带来良好的用户体验，而多核处理器是当今硬件技术的廉价组件。然而，快速交互并行应用程序的开发可能具有挑战性，因为程序员必须同时处理多个非常重要的问题，包括异步性、并发性和确保应用程序响应。该项目专注于开发软件基础设施，以使非专业程序员能够编写在多核硬件上快速运行的并行交互应用程序。所得到的平台提供：(1)将并行性和并发性规范与调度分离并封装不确定性的高级语言抽象；(2)实现各种期望的性能标准的可证明且实际有效的调度器；(3)用于推理计算性能的定义良好的成本模型；以及(4)用于调试使用该抽象编写的代码的一组高效工具。由此产生的平台使程序员能够提高开发并行交互应用程序的效率，并有效利用多核硬件。该项目的研究成果通过顶级并行计算会议广泛传播。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Modern software tends to be service-oriented, long running, and interactive. The interaction can be external, such as waiting on a user input or a network package, or internal, where the components that make up the application interact with one another, often asynchronously. It is important that interactive applications run fast on commodity multicore hardware, because fast interactions lead to good user experiences, and multicore processors are the bargain components of today's hardware technology. Fast interactive parallel applications can be challenging to develop, however, as the programmer must deal with multiple non-trivial concerns simultaneously, including asynchrony, concurrency, and ensuring application responsiveness.This project focuses on developing software infrastructure to enable non-expert programmers to write parallel interactive applications that run fast on multicore hardware. The resulting platform provides: (1) a high-level language abstraction that decouple parallelism and concurrency specifications from scheduling and encapsulate nondeterminism; (2) a provably and practically efficient scheduler that achieve various desirable performance criteria; (3) a well-defined cost model to reason about the performance of the computation; and (4) a set of efficient tools to debug code written using the abstraction. The resulting platform enables programmer productivity in developing parallel interactive applications and efficient utilization of multicore hardware. The research results from this project is disseminated broadly though top parallel computing conferences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.