Three Technical Talks by Faculty Members of the UPCRC at UC Berkeley ParLab

Creating Game-changing Speed-ups in Compelling Applications using Design Patterns
Kurt Keutzer
Professor, UC Berkeley ParLab

We believe that the key to the design of parallel programs is software architecture, and the key to their efficient implementation is programming frameworks. In our approach, the basis of both is design patterns and a pattern language. Borrowed from civil architecture, the term design pattern means a generalizable solution to a recurring problem. A pattern language is simply an organized way of navigating through a collection of design patterns to produce a design. To test and demonstrate our approach to parallel software development we have applied a pattern-oriented approach to parallel software development to a broad range of applications in computer vision, speech recognition, quantitative finance, games, and natural language translation. In particular we have achieved game changing speed-ups in contour detection and object recognition, MRI image reconstruction, quantitative finance, and large-vocabulary speech recognition. We are implementing frameworks what will enable domain experts to productively achieve the same levels of program efficiency.

Tessellation OS: Restructuring Systems Software for a Multicore World
John Kubiatowicz (Kubi)
Associate Professor, UC Berkeley ParLab

In this talk, I will present the design of our new operating system, called Tessellation, and our goals of responsiveness, real-time behavior, power efficiency, security, and correctness. I will argue that Cells running inside spatial partitions (which include gang-scheduled groups of processors, caches, and bandwidth resources) are a new operating system primitive that should replace processes as the basic unit of isolation, protection, and scheduling in the world of many-core systems. I will describe “two-level scheduling”, an architecture that separates resource distribution from fine-grained resource scheduling, and our self-adapting policy layer for meeting competing QoS requirements. I will present some specific application use-cases and (given time) explore some hardware enhancements that can support on-chip QoS enforcement. The Tessellation prototype currently runs on select commercial many-core platforms as well as an experimental hardware platform called “RAMP” that permits straightforward exploration of new hardware mechanisms.

Parallel Web Browser
Ras Bodik
Associate Professor, UC Berkeley ParLab

The web browser vies for control of the application platform with the likes of Silverlight, Android and Flash. It does well on the laptop but fails on mobiles, whose CPU can’t keep up with the browser’s powerful layout engine and the extensible scripting language. I will describe our parallel algorithms for accelerating the browser’s lexer, parser, CSS matching and layout. I will also describe a language that reconsiders client-side programming. The language combines constraints and events, allowing us to express layout and scripting in one program and enabling parallel script execution.