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Colloquia: Victor Luchangco/Sun Microsystems Transactions Now and for the Future in ACES 2.402

Contact Name: 
Jenna Whitney
Date: 
Jul 11, 2006 2:00pm - 3:00pm


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er Name/Affiliation: Victor Luchangko/Sun Microsystems

Talk Title:
Transactions Now and for the Future

Date/Time: July 11 2006 at 2

:00 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.402

Host: Vijaya Ramachandran

Talk Abstract:
With the advent of desktop multiprocessors and even

chip
multiprocessors
concurrency is increasingly recognized as the

next major
trend in
programming. Unfortunately the current state o

f the art
in concurrent
programming is woefully inadequate: The domi

nant abstraction
for
communication--shared memory mediated by locks-

-is the equivalent
of
assembly code for concurrent programs: it shie

lds you from
the bare machine
but does not provide an adequate means
for further abstraction.
As a
result large concurrent programs ar

e fragile (and almost
always incorrect)
stifling innovation and thr

eatening reliability. As the
world grows
increasingly dependent on

interconnected computing we can
ill afford such
programs.

Tr

ansactions--atomic blocks of code--have been proposed
as a mechanism fo

r
structuring large-scale concurrent programs. They have
been used<

br>successfully for decades in database systems and there
is renewed i

nterest
in providing lightweight transactions at other levels
of the
system: at
the language level and even in hardware. However there are fundamental
challenges for both semantics and implementation to

making
lightweight
transactions available and accessible to programm

ers in
general. Our group
at Sun (and many others) has been explori

ng and devising
mechanisms for
supporting transactions both at the

language level and
in hardware. I will
talk about the benefits of t

ransactional programming the
challenges in
making it feasible and

some work that we are doing to address these challenges.

Speaker Bio

:
Victor Luchangco works in the Scalable Synchronization Research

Group
of Sun Microsystems Laboratories. His research focuses on
deve

loping
algorithms and mechanisms to support concurrent programming
o

n large
-scale distributed systems. He also works with the Programming

Languages
Research Group on the development of Fortress a new langu

age
for
high-productivity scientific computing.

Victor is a t

heoretician by disposition and training but
he is also
interested i

n practical aspects of computing. In particular
he would
like to de

sign mechanisms that people will actually use.
In addition
he is in

terested in exploring how to make proofs for concurrent
systems
easi

er both by changing how people design these systems
and by using
to

ols to aid in formal verification.

Victor received an Sc.D. in Compu

ter Science from MIT in
2001.