PL Seminar: Poli-C: Language extensions for system-wide resource management policies
Speaker: Zachary Anderson, ETH Zurich
Date: Wednesday, June 20 2012
Time: 4:00PM to 5:30PM
Location: 32-G882 (reading room)
Host: Adam Chlipala, CSAIL
Contact: Adam Chlipala, adamc@csail.mit.edu
Relevant URL: http://people.inf.ethz.ch/azachary/
Abstract:
This talk presents Poli-C, a language extension, runtime library, and system daemon that enable fine-grained resource management policies for hierarchically parallel applications. Usually, when an application composes parallel libraries or frameworks, hand-tuning or luck are required to prevent parallel sub-tasks from harmfully competing for resources. The guarantees provided by Poli-C's language extensions allow application programmers to obtain exclusive access to resources so that these parallel sub-tasks may proceed without interference.
Poli-C divides system resources---like CPU utilization, memory, and I/O bandwidth---into two parts of configurable size. The first part is managed by the host OS, and is used by applications not using Poli-C. The second part is set aside for applications that make explicit resource requests using Poli-C's language extensions. In this talk, I will describe the semantics of Poli-C's language extensions, how the kinds of resources managed by Poli-C may be extended and configured, and how special functions called /policies/ allow applications to tailor resource requests at runtime based on resource availability and contention. Finally, I will show how Poli-C enables improved performance for a few interesting hierarchically parallel applications.
Zachary is a postdoc in the Systems Group at ETH.
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