Hi everybody, I am posting the following announcement here because I think it may be interesting to at least some of the Linux-IL members. The event in question is a joint session of the IBM Haifa Research Labs (HRL) Weekly Research Seminar and the HRL Linux Study Group.
For more information on HRL please visit http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/ For more information on HRL weekly seminars please visit http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_seminar.nsf/index.html Note that the weekly seminars are open to the public unless indicated otherwise. Normally, the seminars occur at 11AM on Tuesdays, but this session is on Monday at 2PM to accomodate the speaker's travel schedule. The Linux Study Group is an internal HRL seminar, but I am sure Muli Ben-Yehuda - one of the co-ordinators - will be happy to answer your questions. A final comment: those of you who read the title, the abstract, and the speaker's bio will almost certainly get ideas for questions to the speaker. Here is a very relevant quote from the speaker's email to me: "... Questions about ongoing lawsuits will be cheerfully ignored." Please take that into account. And now - to the announcement: ===================================================================== The IBM Haifa Research Laboratories (HRL) cordially invite you to a joint session of the HRL Weekly Seminar and the HRL Linux Study Group that will take place on February 2, 2004, at 2PM, in the main Auditorium of HRL. The seminar is open to the general public. IBM Haifa Research Labs are located on the Haifa University campus, Mt. Carmel (for directions, see http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/visitorinfo.html). There is no need to register in advance, but you will need to present a picture ID at the reception of the IBM Haifa building. Unfortunately, we are not able to provide parking space for the seminar audience. HRL Weekly Seminar and HRL Linux Study Group Joint Session AN ANALYSIS OF READ-COPY-UPDATE TECHNIQUES IN OPERATING SYSTEM KERNELS by PAUL McKENNEY IBM Storage Software Architecture Group and IBM Linux Technology Center ABSTRACT Although large-scale shared-memory multiprocessing hardware and software reached the mainstream in the past decade, their synchronization mechanisms make use of costly operations that inherently limit both single-CPU performance and shared-memory-multiprocessor scalability. The key problem with these mechanismsis that they do nothing to decrease the intensity of communication required by conventional algorithms, and this high intensity of communication, or tight coupling, in turn requires heavy use of the expensive hardware synchronization mechanisms that impose performance and scalability limitations. Although there have been some high-performance and highly scalable algorithms developed for some important special cases, such as memory allocation and statistical counters, one would wish for a more general approach. Recently, a wide-ranging set of specific solutions to particular synchronization algorithms have come to light which use a common implementation of some support functions and some design patterns. This set of solutions has been loosely termed "read-copy-update" or RCU. This talk demonstrates the performance problems of previous approaches, and analyzes the use of RCU techniques in earlier operating-system kernels in order to derive the needed design patterns. I used these patterns to architect the implementation and use of RCU in the Linux 2.6 kernel, which was instrumental in improving the performance and scalability over that of the Linux 2.4 kernel. Empirical and analytic techniques are used to analyze the performance and simplicity benefits of RCU. About the speaker: Paul McKenney is a Distinguished Engineer in the Storage Software Architecture Group and the Linux Technology Center, and is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. He joined IBM in 2000, working with AIX, Linux, and storage. Prior to that, he worked at Sequent doing SMP and NUMA algorithms. The work described in this talk stems from his work at Sequent and with the Linux 2.6 kernel. We will be happy to see you at HRL. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
