There is more than a decade-long history of using static analysis to find bugs in systems such as Linux. Most of the existing static analyses developed for these systems are simple checkers that find bugs based on pattern matching. Despite the presence ...

Heterogeneous computing on CPUs and GPUs has traditionally used fixed roles for each device: the GPU handles data parallel work by taking advantage of its massive number of cores while the CPU handles non data-parallel work, such as the sequential code ...

What opportunities for multicore scalability are latent in software interfaces, such as system call APIs? Can scalability challenges and opportunities be identified even before any implementation exists, simply by considering interface specifications? ...

Clusters of workstations are a popular platform for high-performance computing. For many parallel applications, efficient use of a fast interconnection network is essential for good performance. Several modern System Area Networks include programmable ...

In this article, we consider analytical techniques for predicting detailed performance characteristics of a single shared memory parallel program for a particular input. Analytical models for parallel programs have been successful at providing simple ...

Customizing the protocols that manage accesses to different data structures within an application can improve the performance of software shared-memory programs substantially. Existing systems for using customizable protocols are hard to use directly ...

This article presents a practical solution for the cyclic debugging of nondeterministic parallel programs. The solution consists of a combination of record/replay with automatic on-the-fly data race detection. This combination enables us to limit the ...

This article presents dynamic feedback, a technique that enables computations to adapt dynamically to different execution environments. A compiler that uses dynamic feedback produces several different versions of the same source code; each version uses ...

In recent years, a large number of parallel computation models have been proposed to replace the PRAM as the parallel computation model presented to the algorithm designer. Although mostly the theoretical justifications for these models are sound, and ...

Orca is a portable, object-based distributed shared memory (DSM) system. This article studies and evaluates the design choices made in the Orca system and compares Orca with other DSMs. The article gives a quantitative analysis of Orca's coherence ...

Multithreaded programming is difficult and error prone. It is easy to make a mistake in synchronization that produces a data race, yet it can be extremely hard to locate this mistake during debugging. This article describes a new tool, called Eraser, ...

Efficient synchronization is important for achieving good performance in parallel programs, especially on large-scale multiprocessors. Most synchronization algorithms have been designed to run on a dedicated machine, with one application process per ...

The Vesta parallel file system is designed to provide parallel file access to application programs running on multicomputers with parallel I/O subsystems. Vesta uses a new abstraction of files: a file is not a sequence of bytes, but rather it can be ...

Mentat is an object-oriented parallel processing system designed to simplify the task of writing portable parallel programs for parallel machines and workstation networks. The Mentat compiler and run-time system work together to automatically manage the ...

Traditional disk arrays have a centralized architecture, with a single controller through which all requests flow. Such a controller is a single point of failure, and its performance limits the maximum number of disks to which the array can scale. We ...

We believe the paucity of massively parallel, shared-memory machines follows from the lack of a shared-memory programming performance model that can inform programmers of the cost of operations (so they can avoid expensive ones) and can tell hardware ...

In scalable parallel machines, processors can make local memory accesses much faster than they can make remote memory accesses. Additionally, when a number of remote accesses must be made, it is usually more efficient to use block transfers of data ...

Application programs written for large-scale multicomputers with interconnection structures known to the programmer (e.g., hypercubes or meshes) use complex communication structures for connecting the applications' parallel tasks. Such structures ...

Rule-based systems are widely used in artificial intelligence for modeling intelligent behavior and building expert systems. Most rule-based programs, however, are extremely computation intensive and run quite slowly. The slow speed of execution has ...

To increase speed and reliability of operation, multiple computers are replacing uniprocessors and wired-logic controllers in modern robots and industrial control systems. However, performance increases are not attained by such hardware alone. The ...