Computer Engineering Commons^™

Proving Non-Deterministic Computations In Agda, Sergio Antoy, Michael Hanus, Steven Libby

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We investigate proving properties of Curry programs using Agda. First, we address the functional correctness of Curry functions that, apart from some syntactic and semantic differences, are in the intersection of the two languages. Second, we use Agda to model non-deterministic functions with two distinct and competitive approaches incorporating the non-determinism. The first approach eliminates non-determinism by considering the set of all non-deterministic values produced by an application. The second approach encodes every non-deterministic choice that the application could perform. We consider our initial experiment a success. Although proving properties of programs is a notoriously difficult task, the functional logic …

Resizable, Scalable, Concurrent Hash Tables Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett, Paul E. Mckenney, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Presentation focusing on software synchronization, thread locking, transactional memory, and relativistic programming. Hash table algorithms are presented with examples of relativistic list insertion and removal, and related data structures. Existing approaches are compared to new methodologies and future work with relativistic data structures.

Generalized Construction Of Scalable Concurrent Data Structures Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett, Paul E. Mckenney, Philip W. Howard, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present relativistic programming, a concurrent programming model based on shared addressing, which supports efficient, scalable operation on either uniform shared-memory or distributed shared- memory systems. Relativistic programming provides a strong causal ordering property, allowing a series of read operations to appear as an atomic transaction that occurs entirely between two ordered write operations. This preserves the simple immutable-memory programming model available via mutual exclusion or transactional memory. Furthermore, relativistic programming provides joint-access parallelism, allowing readers to run concurrently with a writer on the same data. We demonstrate a generalized construction technique for concurrent data structures based on relativistic programming, …

The Ordering Requirements Of Relativistic And Reader-Writer Locking Approaches To Shared Data Access, Philip William Howard, Josh Triplett, Jonathan Walpole, Paul E. Mckenney

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The semantics of reader-writer locks allow read-side concurrency. Unfortunately, the locking primitives serialize access to the lock variable to an extent that little or no concurrency is realized in practice for small critical sections. Relativistic programming is a methodology that also allows read- side concurrency. Relativistic programming uses dfferent ordering constraints than reader-writer locking. The different ordering constraints allow relativistic readers to proceed without synchronization so relativistic readers scale even for very short critical sections. In this paper we explore the diferences between the ordering constraints for reader-writer locking and relativistic programs. We show how and why the dfferent ordering …

Irrelevance, Polymorphism, And Erasure In Type Theory, Richard Nathan Mishra-Linger

Dissertations and Theses

Dependent type theory is a proven technology for verified functional programming in which programs and their correctness proofs may be developed using the same rules in a single formal system. In practice, large portions of programs developed in this way have no computational relevance to the ultimate result of the program and should therefore be removed prior to program execution. In previous work on identifying and removing irrelevant portions of programs, computational irrelevance is usually treated as an intrinsic property of program expressions. We find that such an approach forces programmers to maintain two copies of commonly used datatypes: a …

What Is Rcu, Fundamentally?, Paul E. Mckenney, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Read-copy update (RCU) is a synchronization mechanism that was added to the Linux kernel in October of 2002. RCU achieves scalability improvements by allowing reads to occur concurrently with updates. In contrast with conventional locking primitives that ensure mutual exclusion among concurrent threads regardless of whether they be readers or updaters, or with reader-writer locks that allow concurrent reads but not in the presence of updates, RCU supports concurrency between a single updater and multiple readers. RCU ensures that reads are coherent by maintaining multiple versions of objects and ensuring that they are not freed up until all pre-existing read-side …

Teabag: A Debugger For Curry, Stephen Lee Johnson

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis describes TeaBag, which is a debugger for functional logic computations. TeaBag is an accessory of a virtual machine currently under development. A distinctive feature of this machine is its operational completeness of computations, which places novel demands on a debugger. This thesis describes the features of TeaBag, in particular the handling of non-determinism, the ability to control nondeterministic steps, to remove context information, to toggle eager evaluation, and to set breakpoints on both functions and terms. This thesis also describes TeaBag's architecture and its interaction with the associated virtual machine. Finally, some debugging sessions of defective programs are …

Porting Chorus To The Pa-Risc: Building, Debugging, Testing And Validation, Ravi Konuru, Marion Hakanson, Jon Inouye, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This document is part of a series of reports describing the design decisions made in porting the Chorus Operating System to the Hewlett-Packard 9000 Series 800 workstation. This document describes the environment for building the Chorus kernel, the various kernel tests, and the debugging environment used for porting the Chorus operating system to the HP PA-RISC.

The information contained in this paper will be of interest to people who wish to:

• Use the PA-Chorus kernel for development and/or modification, • Know about the build environment for Chorus kernel on PA-RISC, • Know about the PA-Chorus approach to debugging, • …