CellFS: Taking the &amp;#x201C;DMA&amp;#x201D; out of Cell programming

Ionkov, Latchesar; Nyrhinen, Aki; Mirtchovski, Andrey

doi:10.1109/ipdps.2009.5160939

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Low level, DMA-based code can then be automatically generated from high-level programs. High-level programming models for the Cell processor which avoid explicit DMA programming include Sequoia [24], CellSs [4], CellFS [36], Sieve C++ [16] and Offload C++ [12,17]. A formal approach along these lines involves using session types to specify communication [33,47].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic analysis of DMA races using model checking and k-induction

Donaldson

Kroening

Rümmer

2011

Form Methods Syst Des

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Modern multicore processors, such as the Cell Broadband Engine, achieve high performance by equipping accelerator cores with small "scratch-pad" memories. The price for increased performance is higher programming complexity -the programmer must manually orchestrate data movement using direct memory access (DMA) operations. Programming using asynchronous DMA operations is error-prone, and DMA races can lead to nondeterministic bugs which are hard to reproduce and fix. We present a method for DMA race analysis in C programs. Our method works by automatically instrumenting a program with assertions modeling the semantics of a memory flow controller. The instrumented program can then be analyzed using state-of-the-art software model checkers. We show that bounded model checking is effective for detecting DMA races in buggy programs. To enable automatic verification of the correctness of instrumented programs, we present a new formulation of k-induction geared towards software, as a proof rule operating on loops. Our techniques are implemented as a tool, SCRATCH, which we apply to a large set of programs supplied with the IBM Cell SDK, in which we discover a previously unknown bug. Our experimental results indicate that our k-induction method performs extremely well on this problem class. To our knowledge, this marks both the first application of k-induction to software verification, and the first example of software model checking in the context of heterogeneous multicore processors.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic analysis of DMA races using model checking and k-induction

Donaldson

Kroening

Rümmer

2011

Form Methods Syst Des

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“…Some early attempts [26] have been made to extend synthetic file system control and monitoring of such environments -but it is our belief that a more tightly integrated model would benefit clusters in which such hybrid accelerators are present.…”

Section: Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

XCPU2 distributed seamless desktop extension

Ionkov

Hensbergen

2009

2009 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing and Workshops

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XCPU2 is the evolution of our XCPU process management system which allows the users to compose the environment of the remote cluster nodes to match that of their desktop workstation. This creates the illusion of cluster computation resources being a seamless extension of their desktop interface, facilitating cluster acceleration of workflows which can be composed and visualized on the end-user desktop. XCPU2 allows programs running on the cluster to use the same versions of the libraries and tools the user installed locally on their desktop, and access support files such as configuration and data in the familiar places in which they are located on the end-user's workstation.XCPU2 builds on our earlier work with the XCPU process management system. Like XCPU, XCPU2's interface is represented as a set of files exported by a 9P file server. It supports heterogeneous clusters and multiple head nodes. Unlike XCPU, it uses a pull instead of push model for distributed applications, binaries, and data.In this paper we describe the XCPU2 clustering model, its operation and how the per-job filesystem configuration can be used to solve some of the common problems when running a cluster.

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“…The native Linux 9p client also inspired a BSD client, a FUSE client, as well as a dozen language bindings including ones for Ruby, C, Python, Java, Caml, LISP, and TCL. IBM's involvement in the v9fs project created an ongoing relationship with LANL and Sandia National Labs leading to collaboration on several other mutually beneficial research activities [6,11].…”

Section: The V9fs Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open source as a foundation for systems research

Ben-Yehuda¹,

Hensbergen²

2008

SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev.

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You are a systems researcher at a corporate research lab. The corporation you work for deals with both proprietary and open source software. You have an exciting new idea that will undoubtedly revolutionize the field, but first you need to build a working system to validate it. Before embarking on your exploratory research project, you must decide: Do you start from scratch, or do you build upon a mature system? And if the latter---should the system be proprietary or open source?

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CellFS: Taking the “DMA” out of Cell programming

Cited by 4 publications

References 5 publications

Automatic analysis of DMA races using model checking and k-induction

Automatic analysis of DMA races using model checking and k-induction

XCPU2 distributed seamless desktop extension

Open source as a foundation for systems research

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