[Colloquium] Rainey/MS Presentation/Dec. 7, 2006

[Margaret Jaffey]

This is an announcement of Mike Rainey's MS Presentation.

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Date:  Thursday, December 7, 2006

Time:  1:30 p.m.

Place:  Ryerson 276

M.S. Candidate:  Mike Rainey

M.S. Paper Title:  The Manticore Runtime Model

Abstract:

Manticore is a new programming language that supports parallelism at  
multiple levels and different granularities. It has a novel  
combination of data-parallel constructs, which support fine-grained  
computations over sequences, and explicit threading, which support  
concurrent systems programming and coarse-grained parallelism. The  
language also serves as a testbed for adding other fine-grained  
parallel constructs, such as futures with work stealing. Supporting  
this heterogeneous parallelism poses new problems for the runtime  
system.

Different parallel constructs have disparate demands for scheduling  
and processor allocation. Threads, for instance, need load balancing  
to encourage parallelism, e.g., work stealing, and they need timed  
preemption to simulate more parallelism. On the other hand, data- 
parallel computations need a mechanism both to keep processors active  
and to throttle parallelism when it is overabundant, e.g., workcrews,  
and they need at mechanism for provisioning processors. Since these  
parallel constructs run in the same language and share the same  
processors, their scheduling policies must coordinate in a coherent  
framework.

The main contribution of this research is a runtime model that serves  
as a unified substrate for the Manticore language. The model exists  
at a midpoint between the surface language and the machine. At this  
stage in the compiler, all parallel constructs are made explicit so  
that new schedulers can be developed. To speed development and  
improve modularity, the model provides a framework for writing both  
nested and heterogeneous schedulers.

Advisor:  Prof. John Reppy

A draft copy of Mike Rainey's MS Paper is available in Ry 161A.

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Margaret P. Jaffey                             margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 161A)        (773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago                  http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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