Transactions: A New Approach to Programming and Prototyping Parallel Systems

Thursday October 6, 2005
Intel Research Pittsburgh (4th Floor CIC)
12 :00 pm

Kunle Olukotun
Stanford University

The most important issue facing future parallel systems is the difficulty of writing parallel programs to run on them. Transactional Coherence and Consistency (TCC) is a new way to implement cache coherency in shared-memory parallel systems by using programmer defined transactions as the fundamental unit of parallel work, communication, coherence, consistency and failure atomicity. TCC has the potential to simplify parallel programming by providing a smooth transition from sequential programs to parallel programs. In this talk, I will describe TCC and explain how to develop parallel applications using the TCC programming model.

I will also briefly describe the architecture of the Stanford Flexible Architecture Research Machine (FARM). FARM is a scalable system based on commercial high-density blade server technology from IBM. FARM is designed to improve the capability of architects and applications developers to experiment with large-scale parallel systems.

Kunle Olukotun is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Olukotun received his Ph.D. from The University of Michigan. Olukotun led the Stanford Hydra single-chip multiprocessor research project which was one of the first microprocessors with multiple processors on a single silicon chip.

Olukotun founded Afara Websystems to develop commercial server systems with chip multiprocessor technology. Afara was acquired by Sun Microsystems; the Afara microprocessor technology, called Niagara, is now the core of Sun's "Throughput Computing" initiative. Olukotun is actively involved in research in computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel systems.