16th Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP 2008)

Asynchronous systems are attracting the interest of a growing number of designers. However, the lack of simulation tools devoted to asynchronous microarchitectures is a gap that is not narrowed today. One of the main obstacles on the simulation of asynchronous systems is the variable computation delays of their modules, which compute as fast as possible under the actual conditions of the system be... View full abstract»

Microprocessor architecture for both commercial and academical purpose is coming into a new generation: multiprocessors on a chip. Together with this novel architecture, questions and research topics also arise. For example, how to design the on-chip caches to avoid memory operations becoming the performance bottleneck? In this work, we study the impact of various cache architectures on the execut... View full abstract»

On-chip networks are the answer to the growing demands for high communication performance of chip multiprocessors. These networks have a number of characteristics that make their design quite different to off-chip networks. In particular, wires are an abundant available resource inside the chip. In this paper, we explore how to organize the huge wiring capabilities available in on-chip networks. I... View full abstract»

The difficulty of multithreaded programming remains a major obstacle for programmers to fully exploit multicore chips. Transactional memory has been proposed as an abstraction capable of ameliorating the challenges of traditional lock-based parallel programming. Hardware transactional memory (HTM) systems implement the necessary mechanisms to provide transactional semantics efficiently. In order t... View full abstract»

Internet applications require high-performance network server architecture. This paper proposes a kind of software architecture for network server, MEANS, which aims at supporting Internet applications. By introducing a new thread abstraction, micro-thread, MEANS upwardly provides the micro-thread environment to programmers, and downwardly accesses the OS services concurrently through traditional ... View full abstract»

This paper addresses the issue of type safe algorithmic skeletons. From a theoretical perspective we contribute by: formally specifying a type system for algorithmic skeletons, and proving that the type system guarantees type safety. From an implementation point of view, we show how it is possible to enforce the type system on an Java based algorithmic skeleton library. The enforcement takes place... View full abstract»

Autonomic management can be used to improve the QoS provided by parallel/distributed applications. We discuss behavioural skeletons introduced in earlier work: rather than relying on programmer ability to design "from scratch" efficient autonomic policies, we encapsulate general autonomic controller features into algorithmic skeletons. Then we leave to the programmer the duty of specifying the par... View full abstract»

Parallel programming models based on a mixture of task and data parallelism have shown to be successful in addressing the increasing communication overhead of distributed memory platforms with a large number of processors. In these models, an application is decomposed into a set of parallel tasks that can run on an arbitrary number of processors. The communication between different tasks is allowe... View full abstract»

We study the problem of parallel stream computations on a multiprocessor architecture. Modelling the problem, we exhibit that any parallelisation introduces an arithmetic overhead related to intermediate copy operations. We provide lower bounds for the parallel stream computation on p processors of different speeds with two models, a strict model and a buffered model; to our knowledge, these are n... View full abstract»

Distributed software environments are increasingly complex and difficult to manage, as they integrate various legacy software with specific management interfaces. Moreover, the fact that management tasks are performed by humans leads to many configuration errors and low reactivity. This is particularly true in medium or large-scale grid infrastructures. To address this issue, we developed Jade, a ... View full abstract»

We present an approach to implementing and using global pointers in a distributed computing environment. The programmer is able to create pointer-based distributed data structures, which can then be used by sequential or parallel programs without having to differentiate between local and global pointers. Any reference to a remote address causes the process to either migrate to the remote host, whe... View full abstract»

The personal network (PN) concept extends the personal area network (PAN) by including remote personal nodes, such as nodes at home or in the office. This extension is achieved through dynamic tunnels established between the remote PN entities. Scalability presents a major challenge for tunnel management in PNs due to their dynamic nature and the increasing number of simultaneously supported PNs. ... View full abstract»

The user and services provided by resources in grid environments are dynamic. Therefore, the malicious nodes may exist in grid system. It will significantly affect the quality of service (QOS) requirements of users, even lead to the economic loss of user in the grid economic environment. So a certain resource management scheme has to be implemented in grid economy environments to ensure the enviro... View full abstract»

Different market mechanisms have been used to match resources with users in grids. In this paper, we propose two simple contract-net based resource selection policies in grids with heterogeneous resources. A detailed experimental evaluation of the policies shows that they perform better than other commonly used policies for many scenarios. View full abstract»