European research consortium VELOX supports programming of multi-core systems
Research project will aim to make parallel programming easier for the masses by developing integrated Transactional Memory systems for multi-core computers.
Barcelona, May 21st - A huge challenge facing the computing community today is how
to make programming multi-cores easier. With this goal in mind, the VELOX project,
titled “An Integrated Approach to Transactional Memory on Multi-Core Computers” and
funded by the European Comission with € 4 millions, launched its activities with the
objective of delivering seamless transactional memory (TM) systems that integrate well
at all levels of the system stack at the beginning of this year. Coordinated by the
Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the VELOX consortium gathers nine different partners
that include top research and system integration organizations such as the University of
Neuchâtel, the Technische Universität Dresden, Ecole Politechnique Fédérale de
Lausanne, Tel Aviv University, Chalmers University of Technology as well as leading
integrators from the IT industry such as AMD, Red Hat and VirtualLogix SAS. This threeyear
project will obtain some research results that will enable Europe to become lead in a
subset of the TM domain.
The adoption of multi-core chips as the architecture-of-choice for mainstream computing
will undoubtedly bring about profound changes in the way software is developed. In this
brave new era, programs will need to be rewritten in a parallel way for computers that
have multiple processing cores. One of the fundamental issues in developing parallel
programs is a coordinated and orderly way of accessing shared data. The use of previous
techniques such as fine grained locking as the multi-core programmer's coordination
methodology is viewed by most experts as a dead-end since locking is too complicated
for the average programmer.
The TM programming paradigm is a strong contender to become the approach of choice
for replacing those coordination techniques and implementing atomic operations in
concurrent programming. Combining sequences of concurrent operations into atomic
transactions promises a great reduction in the complexity of both programming and
verification, by making parts of the code appear to be sequential without the need to
program fine-grained locks. Transactions remove from the programmer the burden of
figuring out the interaction among concurrent operations that happen to conflict when
accessing the same locations in memory.
“Thanks to the complementary skills of its partners, it will pave the way for key European
researchers to make significant contributions to the ongoing revolution to make parallel
programming easier for the masses”, says Osman Unsal, leader of the VELOX project.
Mateo Valero, director of BSC, stressed that “the VELOX project is crucial to enable the
supercomputing applications of today to run on the laptops of the near future.”
To make TM an effective tool, TM systems will need the right hardware and software
support to provide scalability not only in terms of number of cores, but also in terms of
code size and complexity. The objective of the VELOX project is to understand how to
provide such support by developing an integrated TM stack. Such a TM stack would span
a system from the underlying hardware to the high end application and would consist of
the following components: CPU, operating system, runtime, libraries, compilers,
programming languages and application environments. The team includes internationally
recognized TM experts in each of those components. These fully integrated TM systems
will not only improve the understanding of TM designs but will greatly help in the
adoption of the TM paradigm by the European software industry, making it a tool-ofchoice
for concurrent programming on multi-core platforms.
For further information:
Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Tel: (00 34) 93 413 40 82 / (00 34) 93 413 75 14
Renata Giménez Binder / Sara Ibañez
Press Department
press@bsc.es