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Type of Talk: UTCS Colloquium

Speaker/ Affiliation: Victor Pankrat

ius/ University of Karlsruhe, Germany

Date/ Time: Friday, September

4, 2009/ 10:00 a.m.

Location: Taylor 3.128

Host: Kathryn McKinle

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Talk Title: "Transactional Memory versus Locks - A Comparative Case

Study"

Talk Abstract:
Transactional Memory (TM) promises to simplify
parallel programming by replacing locks with atomic transactions. This pap

er assesses the value proposition of TM based on a comparative case study w

ith real programmers. Twelve students, working in teams of two, wrote a p

arallel desktop search engine in C/C++ during a five month lab. Three rando

mly chosen study groups (TM teams) competed for the best performance using

Intel''s Software Transactional Memory compiler and Pthreads, while three

control groups (locks teams) competed using just Pthreads. The talk summari

zes which approaches worked and which did not work. Moreover, the talk dis

cusses surprising performance results, code metrics, hours spent on diffe

rent types of tasks, student feedback from weekly interviews, and results
from a questionnaire.

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Pankratius heads the young i

nvestigator "Software Engineering for Multicore Systems" group at the Unive

rsity of Karlsruhe, Germany. He also serves as the elected chairman of the
"Software Engineering for parallel Systems" international working group in
the German Computer Science Society. Dr. Pankratius'' current research con

centrates on how to make parallel programming easier for the average progra

mmer. His work on multicore software engineering covers a range of research
topics including empirical studies, auto-tuning, language design, and d

ebugging. Dr. Pankratius received the Intel Leadership Award and holds a Ph

.D. with distinction from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.