research-article

LVars: lattice-based data structures for deterministic parallelism

Authors:

Ryan R. NewtonAuthors Info & Claims

FHPC '13: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Functional high-performance computing

Pages 71 - 84

https://doi.org/10.1145/2502323.2502326

Published: 23 September 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Programs written using a deterministic-by-construction model of parallel computation are guaranteed to always produce the same observable results, offering programmers freedom from subtle, hard-to-reproduce nondeterministic bugs that are the scourge of parallel software. We present LVars, a new model for deterministic-by-construction parallel programming that generalizes existing single-assignment models to allow multiple assignments that are monotonically increasing with respect to a user-specified lattice. LVars ensure determinism by allowing only monotonic writes and "threshold" reads that block until a lower bound is reached. We give a proof of determinism and a prototype implementation for a language with LVars and describe how to extend the LVars model to support a limited form of nondeterminism that admits failures but never wrong answers.

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LVars: lattice-based data structures for deterministic parallelism

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cover image ACM Conferences

FHPC '13: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Functional high-performance computing

September 2013

104 pages

ISBN:9781450323819

DOI:10.1145/2502323

General Chairs:
Clemens Grelck
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
,
Fritz Henglein
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
,
Program Chairs:
Umut Acar
Carnegie Mellon University, USA
,
Jost Berthold
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 23 September 2013

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ICFP'13

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SIGPLAN

ICFP'13: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 23, 2013

Massachusetts, Boston, USA

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FHPC '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 8 of 14 submissions, 57%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 18 of 25 submissions, 72%

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Hellerstein JLaddad SMilano MPower CSamuel MLiu YSchiller E(2023)Invited Paper: Initial Steps Toward a Compiler for Distributed ProgramsProceedings of the 5th workshop on Advanced tools, programming languages, and PLatforms for Implementing and Evaluating algorithms for Distributed systems10.1145/3584684.3597272(1-10)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3584684.3597272
Wilkins MWestrick SKandiah VBernat ASuchy BDeiana ECampanoni SAcar UDinda PHardavellas NDubach CBruening DHardekopf B(2023)WARDen: Specializing Cache Coherence for High-Level Parallel LanguagesProceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/3579990.3580013(122-135)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579990.3580013
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Weidner MMiller HMeiklejohn C(2020)Composing and decomposing op-based CRDTs with semidirect productsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34089764:ICFP(1-27)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2020
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Westrick SYadav RFluet MAcar U(2019)Disentanglement in nested-parallel programsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33711154:POPL(1-32)Online publication date: 20-Dec-2019
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