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Handling competitive aspects of Synchronization in Shared Environments using lock usage fairness

Series: Department Seminar

Speaker: Prof. Yuvraj Patel The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh

Date/Time: May 08 16:00:00

Location: CSA Seminar Hall (Room No. 254, First Floor)

Abstract:
In shared environments such as operating systems, multiple tenants with varied requirements compete to access the shared resources, making strong performance isolation necessary. Locks are one of the widely used synchronization primitives that provide mutual exclusion in such environments.
In this talk, I will emphasize the competitive aspects of synchronization in such shared environments. I will start by introducing the notion of lock usage -- a new lock property that deals with the time spent in the critical section. Then, I will show how unfair lock usage in shared environments leads to two new problems -- scheduler subversion and adversarial synchronization. I will then introduce two solutions -- Scheduler Cooperative Locks and Tratr that view synchronization as a resource to mitigate these two problems. Lastly, I will talk about our current work on ensuring hierarchical fairness using lock usage and the design of work-conservative Scheduler Cooperative Locks.

Speaker Bio:
Yuvraj Patel is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Computer Science in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He is a member of the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture (ICSA). Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher and an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his Ph.D. working with Prof. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Prof. Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to graduate school, he spent nine years writing enterprise Operating Systems and File Systems code for NetApp and elsewhere. He is interested in building systems, and his work spans several areas — Concurrency, Operating Systems, Security, Storage & File Systems, and Distributed Systems. He is interested in studying real-world isolation-related problems that arise in concurrent systems due to the sharing of resources.

Host Faculty: Sumit Kumar Mandal