Concurrency for the Application Programmer

Mon 8:30-5:00 pm - Southern Pacific F
Vijay Saraswat, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, United States
Doug Lea, SUNY Oswego, United States

Forced by architectural and commercial considerations, programmers now have to confront multi-core systems, heterogeneity, clusters, clouds.

What does this revolution mean for the application programmer, typically removed from the hardware through many layers of middle-ware (often on top of managed run-time environments)? How should the capabilities of heterogeneous processors (including GPUs, FPGAs, streaming processors) and heterogeneous memory (including non-coherent memory) be made available to the application programmer? Should abstractions for the application programmer focus primarily on application-level concurrency rather than implementation-level concurrency? Should application-level concurrency abstractions be fundamentally determinate? Fundamentally declarative? Resilient in the face of node- and network- failure? How can high-performance concurrent programs be written in garbage-collected languages? How can they {not be written in garbage-collected languages?

This workshop aims to bring together practitioners and thinkers to address all topics around concurrency for the application programmer.

 

2009 Highlights

Brion Vibber

Brion Vibber discusses the challenges of working with user communities, social bottlenecks, the Wikipedia article deletion process, scalability of software vs communities, new approaches to scaling communities, ongoing challenges with MediaWiki community, using git to scale the code commit process, automated Wikipedia edit filtering, flagged protection pages, and remaining challenges to face.

Watch the video on InfoQ.

More Highlights