Date: March 17, 2022
Time: 3:00pm
Abstract:
Persistent
memory
(PMEM)
marries
the
low
latency
of
DRAM
with
the
durability
of
secondary
storage
devices,
enabling
both
simpler
and
faster
data-intensive
software
applications.
Recent
years
witnessed
the
next
evolution
of
this
technology
as
Intel,
in
partnership
with
Micron,
developed
and
commercially
released
the
Optane
persistent
memory
module,
which
uses
a
proprietary
3D
stacked
memory
technology.
In
parallel
with
these
efforts,
the
Storage
Networking
Industry
Association
(SNIA)
devised
a
standard
programming
model
for
persistent
memory,
based
on
the
notion
that
persistent
memory
is
exposed
to
applications
by
the
operating
system
through
memory-mapped
files.
The
growing
adoption
of
modern
PMEM
devices
upends
some
long-standing
traditions
in
distributed
computing
theory,
such
as
the
strong
emphasis
on
parallelism
over
fault
tolerance
in
the
design
of
in-memory
data
structures
and
synchronization
primitives.
In
this
talk,
I
will
discuss
the
impact
of
the
modern
PMEM-empowered
memory
hierarchy
on
research
in
distributed
computing
theory,
particularly
in
the
area
of
shared
memory
algorithms.
The
seminar
will
cover
abstract
failure
and
recovery
models,
specifications
of
correctness,
as
well
as
the
complexity
and
computability
of
fundamental
synchronization
problems.
Biography:
Wojciech Golab received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Toronto in 2010. In the same year, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary and joined Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto as a Research Scientist. In 2012, he became a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Wojciech is broadly interested in concurrency and fault tolerance in distributed systems, with a special focus on bridging the gap between theory and practice. The ACM Computing Reviews recognized his doctoral research on shared memory algorithms among 91 "notable computing items published in 2012,'' and several of his other publications have been distinguished with best paper awards and journal invitations. Wojciech presently serves on the editorial boards of Information Processing Letters and Distributed Computing.