Disciplined Message Passing

November 13, 2009
Edward A. Lee | UC Berkeley

This talk addresses the question of whether message passing provides an adequate programming model for multicore processors. It argues that programmers need more structure than what is provided by today’s popular message passing libraries. Collective operations and design patterns offer some structure, but as the use of concurrency in programming increases, application programmers will have increasing difficulty identifying and combining these into complex operations. Some challenges, such as ensuring data determinacy and managing deadlock and buffer memory, require considerable expertise to implement correctly. This paper argues that the solution is to provide infrastructure-level support implementing more disciplined concurrent models of computation (MoCs).

Speaker Details

Edward A. Lee is the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor and former chair of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) department at U.C. Berkeley. His research interests center on design, modeling, and simulation of embedded, real-time computational systems. He is a director of Chess, the Berkeley Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems, and is the director of the Berkeley Ptolemy project. He is co-author of five books and numerous papers. His bachelor’s degree (B.S.) is from Yale University (1979), his masters (S.M.) from MIT (1981), and his Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley (1986). From 1979 to 1982 he was a member of technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, in the Advanced Data Communications Laboratory. He is a co-founder of BDTI, Inc., where he is currently a Senior Technical Advisor, and has consulted for a number of other companies. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and won the 1997 Frederick Emmons Terman Award for Engineering Education.