Archive of posts with the tag SPLASH

• Oct 17, 2021: Actors! And now?

  An Implementer’s Perspective on High-level Concurrency Models, Debugging Tools, and the Future of Automatic Bug Mitigation

• Oct 15, 2017: Debugging Concurrency Is Hard, but We Can Do Something About It!

  When we have to debug applications that use concurrency, perhaps written in Java, all we get from the debugger is a list of threads, perhaps some information about held locks, and the ability to step through each thread separately.

• Oct 25, 2016: Cross-Language Compiler Benchmarking: Are We Fast Yet?

  Research on programming languages is often more fun when we can use our own languages. However, for research on performance optimizations that can be a trap. In the end, we need to argue that what we did is comparable to state-of-the-art language implementations. Ideally, we are able to show that our own little language is not just a research toy, but that it is, at least performance-wise, competitive with for instance Java or JavaScript VMs.

• Sep 10, 2012: RACES'12: Public Reviews + Paper Drafts + Voting on Agenda == Workshop 2.0?

  [Disclaimer: I am one of the assistants supporting the RACES’12 organizers and a PC member.]

• Jun 26, 2012: Workshop on Relaxing Synchronization for Multicore and Manycore Scalability

  You got a big multicore, or manycore machine, but do not have a clue of how to actually use it, because your application doesn’t seem to scale naturally? Well, that seems to be a problem many people are facing in our new manycore age. One possible solution might be to accept less precise answers by relaxing synchronization constraints. That could allow us to circumvent Amdahl’s law when Gustafson is out of reach.

• Nov 2, 2011: OOSPLA 2011 @SPLASH2011, Day 3

  The third day started with Brendan Eich’s keynote on JavaScript’s world domination plan. It was a very technical keynote, not very typical I suppose. And he was rushing through his slides with an enormous speed. Good that I have some JavaScript background. Aside all the small things he mentioned, interesting for me is that he seemed to be very interested to get Intel’s RiverTrail approach to data-parallelism into ECMAScript in one or another form. That is kind of contradicting the position I heard so far, that ECMAScript would be done with having WebWorkers as a model for concurrency and parallel programming.

• Oct 31, 2011: OOSPLA 2011 @SPLASH2011, Day 2

  The second day of the technical tracks started with a keynote by Markus Püschel. He is not the typical programming language researcher you meet at OOPSLA, but he does research in automatic optimization of programs. In his keynote, he showed a number of examples how to get the best performance for a given algorithm out of a particular processor architecture. Today’s compilers are still not up to the task, and will probably never be up to it. Given a naïve implementation, hand-optimized C code can have 10x speedup when dependencies are made explicit, and the compiler knows that no aliasing can happen. He was then discussing how that can be approached in an automated way, and was also thinking about what programming languages could do.

• Oct 29, 2011: OOSPLA 2011 @SPLASH2011, Day 1

  The first day of the technical tracks including OOPSLA started with a keynote by Ivan Sutherland titled The Sequential Prison. His main point was that the way we think and the way we build machines and software is based on sequential concepts. The words we use to communicate and express ourselves are often of a very sequential nature. His examples included: call, do, repeat, program, and instruction. Other examples that shape and restrict our way of thinking are for instance basic data structures and concepts like strings (character sequences). However, we also use words that enable thinking about concurrency and parallelism much better. His examples for these included: configure, pipeline, connect, channel, network, and path.

• Oct 26, 2011: DLS'11 and VMIL'11 @SPLASH2011

  The second conference day was unfortunately full of “conflicts of interest”… It was pretty hard to choose between all the talks on the schedule.

• Oct 24, 2011: Transitioning to Multicore @SPLASH2011

  And here we go again: SPLASH 2011 has started with its first day of workshops.

• Nov 2, 2010: SPLASH'10 Main Conference

  Tuesday – Evolution, Onward!, FPGAs, and the Hera-JVM

• Oct 30, 2010: Workshops at SPLASH 2010

  As usual I will write about a few of my personal highlights of SPLASH and the co-located workshops. That is mostly from my spotty notes, and from memory, so I don’t guarantee 100% accuracy, especially with respect to what other people might have said.

• Jul 30, 2010: Doctoral Symposium at SPLASH 2010

  In October, I will give a brief presentation on the state of affairs with my PhD research at the SPLASH 2010 Doctoral Symposium. The basic idea has not changed since my last presentation at the TiC’10 summer school. I haven’t been able to do a lot of real work for it, but the ideas are a bit clearer now. The following two-page proposal will be published as part of the conference proceedings.