Non-deterministic parallelism considered useful
University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory
Proceedings of the 13th USENIX conference on Hot topics in operating systems, HotOS’13, 2011
@inproceedings{murray2011non,
title={Non-deterministic parallelism considered useful},
author={Murray, D.G. and Hand, S.},
booktitle={HotOS XIII, 13th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems},
year={2011}
}
The development of distributed execution engines has greatly simplified parallel programming, by shielding developers from the gory details of programming in a distributed system, and allowing them to focus on writing sequential code [8, 11, 18]. The "sacred cow" in these systems is transparent fault tolerance, which is achieved by dividing the computation into atomic tasks that execute deterministically, and hence may be re-executed if a participant fails or some intermediate data are lost. In this paper, we explore the possibility of relaxing this requirement, on the premise that non-determinism is useful and sometimes essential to support many programs.
September 21, 2011 by hgpu
