Title: Efficient Consistency in Emerging Systems and Architectures

Pranith Kumar
School of Computer Science
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Data: Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Time: 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM EST
Location: KACB 1202

Committee
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Dr. Hyesoon Kim (Advisor), School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Milos Prvulovic, School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Santosh Pande, School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract
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With the improvements in single core performance and processor clocks reaching
a plateau, diverse systems and architectures are being explored to keep pace
with Moore’s law. The different kinds of parallel processors being explored
are homogeneous, heterogeneous, and discrete offload-able systems. The most
common type processing systems is where the individual processors share
a single address space. One main challenge in parallel processing
architectures is ensuring memory consistency without sacrificing performance.

In this dissertation, we focus on reducing the overhead of memory consistency
in such parallel processing systems. Our first focus is on traditional
multi-core processors that implement the Release Consistency memory model
where we propose to use versions to reduce the consistency overhead. Next, we
work on near-data processing systems to identify bottlenecks and propose both
software and hardware techniques to reduce the consistency overhead. Finally,
we study cross-ISA virtual machines that when used for emulating strong memory
model architectures on weak architectures (x86 on ARM) and identify
overheads. We propose both software and hardware techniques to reduce this
overhead.