Citation
Edward A. Lee. "Disciplined Message Passing". Technical report, EECS Dept. University of California Berkeley, January, 2009.

Abstract
This paper addresses the question of whether message passing provides an adequate programming model to address current needs in programming multicore processors. It studies the pitfalls of message passing as a concurrency model and argues that programmers need more structure than what is provided by today's popular message passing libraries. Collective operations and design patterns can help a great deal but as the use of concurrency in programming increases application programmers will have increasing difficulty identifying and combining these into complex operations. Moreover some challenges such as ensuring data determinacy and managing deadlock and buffer memory are extremely subtle and require considerable expertise to implement correctly. This paper illustrates this point by giving a few problematic examples. I argue that application programmers should not have to deal with many of these challenges but with today's message passing libraries they have no choice. The solution is to provide infrastructure-level support implementing more disciplined concurrent models of computation (MoCs). I show excellent implementations of the requisite mechanisms thus enabling application programmers to focus on the functionality of the application rather than on avoiding the pitfalls of concurrent programming.

Electronic downloads

• http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-7.html

• HTML

  Edward A. Lee. <a
  href="http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/pubs/516.html"
  ><i>Disciplined Message
  Passing</i></a>, Technical report,  EECS Dept.
  University of California Berkeley, January, 2009.

• Plain text

  Edward A. Lee. "Disciplined Message Passing".
  Technical report,  EECS Dept. University of California
  Berkeley, January, 2009.

• BibTeX

  @techreport{Lee09_DisciplinedMessagePassing,
      author = {Edward A. Lee},
      title = {Disciplined Message Passing},
      institution = {EECS Dept. University of California Berkeley},
      month = {January},
      year = {2009},
      abstract = {This paper addresses the question of whether
                message passing provides an adequate programming
                model to address current needs in programming
                multicore processors. It studies the pitfalls of
                message passing as a concurrency model and argues
                that programmers need more structure than what is
                provided by today's popular message passing
                libraries. Collective operations and design
                patterns can help a great deal but as the use of
                concurrency in programming increases application
                programmers will have increasing difficulty
                identifying and combining these into complex
                operations. Moreover some challenges such as
                ensuring data determinacy and managing deadlock
                and buffer memory are extremely subtle and require
                considerable expertise to implement correctly.
                This paper illustrates this point by giving a few
                problematic examples. I argue that application
                programmers should not have to deal with many of
                these challenges but with today's message passing
                libraries they have no choice. The solution is to
                provide infrastructure-level support implementing
                more disciplined concurrent models of computation
                (MoCs). I show excellent implementations of the
                requisite mechanisms thus enabling application
                programmers to focus on the functionality of the
                application rather than on avoiding the pitfalls
                of concurrent programming.},
      URL = {http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/pubs/516.html}
  }
  

Posted by Mary Stewart on 20 Jan 2009.
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